She had taken barely three steps toward the crumpled corpse when a cold, primal warning pricked up her spine.
Laia threw herself sideways. A curved black blade sliced through the air where her throat had been a heartbeat before, its edge nicking her forearm. Sharp, burning cold seeped into the cut. She hit the gravel hard and scrambled back, her face tight with disbelief.
Its head was gone. Its body should have been inert. And yet the thing still moved, still swung its blades on some last, feral instinct.
The Fallen Deity's headless frame stood swaying, its two cursed blades raised, and what was left of its will fixed itself on her with ravenous hatred. It had marked her. It had broken her divine ward, or so it thought. The void would seep into the wound. It would rot her resonance from the inside out. Her kingdom would drown in black mist. It would watch her die screaming, even if it burned out the last of its own essence to do it.
Two minutes dragged by.
Laia stood ten paces back, watching with a faintly annoyed frown as the cut on her arm sealed over, skin knitting smooth and unmarked. The void taint dissolved like smoke in sunlight before it could reach anything vital.
The Fallen Deity froze. It could not comprehend it. The ward should have shattered. The corruption should have burned through her. Her kingdom should have been screaming by now.
It never occurred to the wretched thing that she had never bothered raising a ward in the first place.
Its last embers of will flickered out, seething with futile rage, and the corpse crumpled heavily into the dust.
Laia did not take chances this time. She rematerialized her divine rifle, took careful aim, and emptied three more charged shots into the body until nothing remained but a mangled, smoking pile of corrupted flesh and broken bone. Only then did she step forward again.
She pried the two curved blades from the corpse's clawed hands and strapped them to her belt. Solid mid-grade divine steel, still humming with abyssal enchantment. Not spectacular, but worth a decent handful of crystals if she fenced them through the right fence back in the fringe districts. Every coin counted.
When she pressed her palm to the dead god's chest to seek out its kingdom shard, she frowned. This was no small fragment. This was a full, if badly shrunken, lost realm.
Five hundred square kilometers, by her estimate. Tiny, even for a young god. Three mortal races clung to life inside it, hard-bitten and worn thin by years adrift in the void. A few of them had even awakened Void Resistance on their own—no great surprise, she thought. You either adapted out here or you dissolved.
The whole realm was being held together by a single mid-grade divine artifact embedded in its core.
Spoiled little noble, she thought dryly. Two weapons and a core relic, all mid-grade. Her own first relic had been cobbled together from scrap she'd scavenged from academy trash bins.
Waste not, want not.
She wove a quick binding script with her fingertips and folded the tiny broken kingdom into her own divine reserve. She would merge it later, slow and careful, so it did not shock her existing clans.
Deep inside the drifting lost realm, three chieftains had gathered atop the highest rocky plateau, and the air smelled of defeat.
Lirael, matriarch of the frost wraiths, stood pale and slender, her form half-woven from drifting ice-mist. Borgul, chieftain of the stonehide saurians, sat heavy on his haunches, his stony scales cracked with age. Korg, alpha of the silverback apes, paced back and forth, his knuckles scraping raw furrows into the rock.
They could all feel it. Their god was dead. The realm was unraveling at the seams. By their count, they had a few days left. In the time of the outer divine realms, that would be minutes.
"This is it, then," Lirael said, her voice soft and tired. "We prayed until our throats were raw. He never answered. Not once."
If not for the last sacred relic buried in the mountain, the void mist would have swallowed them all years ago. Their faith had curdled into resentment long ago. Their god had chased the favor of another deity, had charged headlong into a forbidden waste he had known would kill him, and had dragged all thirty thousand of his subjects along for the ride. Their lives had meant less to him than a stranger's smile.
They had watched him lose his mind. They had watched him wander the void, mindless and raving. Now they would watch the end.
Korg snarled and slammed a fist into the rock.
"The gods treat us like dogs," he growled. "Like disposable cattle. If I had to do it all over again? I would never have bent the knee. Never have fought and died for a god who wouldn't even bother to speak to us."
Borgul rumbled a low, heavy sigh.
"Spare me the pride," he said. "I worry for the young ones. If there was a god out there who would actually keep us alive? I'd believe again. One more time. For them."
The words had barely left his mouth when the ground roared.
The whole realm shook. The creeping dissolution halted, mid-creep. The fraying threads of divine resonance wove themselves back together, steady and warm and strange.
And in the deepest part of every soul in the realm, the ancient, ironclad commandment shifted.
Once it had read: The God is the Creator of All, Supreme and Unquestionable.
Now it read: The God shaped the heavens and the earth.
Three words shorter. A world of difference.
They all understood at once. The realm had been taken. They had a new god.
Korg went very still. Cold sweat broke out across his brow.
He'd just said he'd never bend the knee again.
What if the new god had heard? What if they'd been saved from dissolution just to be executed for disrespect? He glanced wildly at the other two. Lirael had gone pale. Borgul had frozen mid-breath. If the new god was the petty, cruel sort they all knew, they would all be put to the sword. Every last one.
Minutes dragged by. No lightning fell. No booming voice roared from the sky. No plagues descended.
Slowly, cautiously, they relaxed.
Then they began to feel the rest of the new commandments settling into the world-rules, one by one, and they stared at each other in growing bewilderment.
Give a being a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he feeds his clan forever.
The divine made the sky and the lands, the sun and the moons. Why should kin spill kin's blood?
Without proper rites and offerings, no kingdom shall know lasting peace.
They sat in silence for a long while, turning the words over.
Commandments only formed for a reason. They were scars, written into the rules of the world by things that had already happened.
"Why would kin spill kin's blood?" Lirael said at last, quiet. "What kind of realm was this, before?"
Borgul huffed. "Foolish creatures, clearly. Must have tried to rise up against the creator. Idiots."
They all knew how that went. Their old god had ruled over five races, once. Two had refused the commandments, had raised armies and marched on his sanctum. He had not struck them down in wrath. He had smiled, and given them tasks, and blessed their fields, and spoken gently of faith.
And then, one by one, misfortune had found them. A hunter would step out of his hut left foot first, and a bolt of divine lightning would turn him to ash. A village would hold a feast on the wrong day, and a landslide would bury them all.
They still argued about it, to this day. The merfolk had been the first to go.
How, exactly, was a merfolk supposed to step out of their front door left foot first?