Chapter 9-290: Of Gods and Mortals (1/2)

Among the Powered, the most favored Kings were the Paladine, as they took their jobs very seriously, indeed, for however long they sat the throne. Overall, Sources were the most effective, as their ability to Make Fate for an entire Kingdom was colossally powerful in the long view of things. The Divine might want a Paladin on the throne, but the people wanted a Source!

Of course, Huul and Imprus had their own ideas about who was best as a King, but those tended to just be Theocracies, which would be in constant conflict with the Land and find it difficult to keep Acclaim. They might be able to keep a True King from rising, but they’d never have one of their own... not that they truly cared, as Kings were their Kingdoms, not the servants of their gods, which was naturally unacceptable to such gods.

There was and would always be people who denied Kingdoms and Allegiances. They lived and struggled on the fringes, making do in their own ways, tending to be extremely self-reliant, and so did not participate in the greater benefits, always getting caught up in the conflicts between gods and nations and swept away.

Opting out was not protection. Opting out just meant you were not heard when you needed help, and were then crushed remorselessly. If you turned to darker Powers to try to get ahead, it got even worse, and genocide was completely not out of the picture for making that choice.

But some people would make those choices, they always did. There were atheists and die-hard Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims still out there, which led into another problem...

------------

“When the Shroud is lifted, the World will change.”

And I would probably not be here. I was 99% certain of it.

“Of all of those consequences, I am not yet certain, but of some of them, I most certainly am. I am going to go over some of them with you.”

On the Holo behind me sprang up:

There was absolutely no doubt that a lot of faces twisted upon seeing all of that. Getting it drilled in that they were pretty small was not going over well, but that wasn’t my problem. I was already aware that as a mortal, I was a bittest of the bit players.

“Let’s begin with the first.” The symbols of the various Divine Powers acknowledged here rose up on the Holo behind me, in their colors.

I began to talk about how the gods viewed the world, as sources of the Mortal Free Will that ended up driving the Alignment Conflicts.

Skin color? Race? Wealth? Temporal Power? The gods didn’t give jack shit about any of that. They cared about Faith and Mortal Free Will. Everything else was just a tool to gain those two things, regardless of the god’s portfolio. The fact that many of the Good gods openly didn’t care about those mortal things, while other gods buried the fact behind teachings to attract people, was simply another Alignment conflict.

You were valuable until the moment you died, and the gods saw you as influence centers and capable of bringing others into their beliefs until you did so. Performing well in the service of your god might give you a reward in the afterlife... but the afterlife was not a place of peace, as any old stories and their own imagination could supply. It was not a Christian realm where Heaven ruled all and kept demons and devils safely stowed in Hell.

Oh, no. Gods had conflicts, gods had battles, and those battles for Faith, Free Will, and the mortal souls that came with them spilled into the mortal plane all the damn time.

When the Shroud was lifted, the Divine and their servants could intervene directly or accidentally, and they would do so, in an ersatz game of Divine influence and moves played across time and space.

There were wars going on in the afterlife, as the Sins and Virtues of the Past and Present gathered into real, fundamental forces that clashed with one another all over Creation.

“But what about Balance?” I asked of them all, and I rolled my eyes to the skies in what was definitely not an encouraging sign. “In the afterlife, Balance is simply where those who have not picked a side choose to go, and they die. If you want Balance, you better swear yourselves to the Inner Planes, to Elemental forces that form the building blocks, lose your humanity, and become Elemental things.

“Oh, and there’s plenty of Aligned creatures in the Elemental Planes, too, and guess what? They go to war over it.”

They all grimaced.

“But,” I raised a finger, “here, now, this mortal life of yours. This, this is where you have value. This is where your actions and deeds mean something. To give you an idea,” I lifted palms and eyes towards the transparent ceiling, and the Haze overhead. “The Shroud.”

A figure of globes formed behind me; growing, expanding out, changing color, expanding out multiple times more, expanding out, layer after layer of expansion.

One of those globes winked, and we zoomed in... to see the Earth spinning there, covered in a blue haze, the fifth generation of expansion of the Shroud.

“Every world before our Earth has fallen to the Shroud. Fallen to undeath.” They started doing the math; some of them could, some of them couldn’t. They only knew it was thousands of entire worlds. “But their deeds mean nothing in the overall scheme of things. Undead do not have Free Will, they are of Evil. Evil’s power does not ‘grow’ where the living fall and the undead rise. It merely gets redistributed from elsewhere, and put here.

“Undead give nothing to Evil whatsoever, regardless of how heinous their deeds are from our perspective. They do not have Free Will, and so, to Evil, they are merely a cleaning tool, like a janitor sweeping the dust of other Alignments out the door, leaving behind nothing of use to anyone, even themselves.”

They all blinked at me in shock.