226 Interlude: Cities And Shortcuts (1/2)
A courtyard a few dozen meters wide and a few dozen meters long overlooked a vast city. The city was empty, impossibly silent and impossibly still. It was a beautiful, if haunting background for the temple which the courtyard guarded. The temple itself was built into a wall of stone, and owed its existence to the whims of a powerful, but inexperienced god, the same god who was hard at work creating new life.
The aforementioned audience for the display of life-creating power consisted of a small number of faith-devils, infernal creatures who had a zealous, utterly insane and warped devotion to the deity who had brought them here. They stood behind their dark lord, metaphorically and literally. The six of them watched the air in front of the ethereal form of their eldritch deity, and gasped when something happened.
The ”something” that elicited a reaction from the devils was a display of divine might. The deity had walked to the courtyard overlooking the gigantic city he had created by hand and he had froze, several minutes ago. But now he came back to life right as numerous bodies came into existence close to him.
The bodies appeared abruptly, with no special or obvious fanfare, but as they appeared so too did life return to the spectral form of the god who was the tyrant that the six members of the ”Tyrant's Hand” worshiped. They were over four dozen of them, and they filled up much of the once empty space of the courtyard.
The bodies themselves were bodies of a number of different humanoid races. They came in all sizes, many dark colors, and universally had a nobility to them that was often at odds with what other humanoid races thought of the members of the races the bodies belonged too.
The most numerous bodies were the bodies of dark elves, statuesque bodies that were universally attractive. The second most numerous of the humanoid races the bodies represented were of dark dwarves, small, dignified, and universally angry looking bodies that were filled with a plethora of negative emotions. The least numerous bodies created by the god were those of dwarves, a largely lawful and industrious race who tended to be talented craftsmen and craftswomen who just as often staunch traditionalists as they were craftspeople.
The god gathered all of the souls he had created and for a split second they were safely ensconced inside of him. He closed his eyes as he allowed them to rest within himself, giving them a second of reprieve following the challenges that came with being created. Once the second passed he opened his eyes and released them, sending them hurtling into the bodies he had created for them to inhabit, each one flying into the body the deity had made for that specific soul without fail.
The souls entered their destined bodies, and in doing so they began to truly awaken for the first time. The souls gave the bodies and the minds of the creatures the spark of true consciousness, true self-awareness, and one by one the bodies began to awaken, their eyes slowly fluttering open for the first time. Or at least most of their eyes began to flutter open.
Some, or rather one, boldly chose to keep her eyes sealed shut, even as her other senses fully roared into life.
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The very first thing I ever sensed was darkness. Intuitively I knew that I sensed this darkness as a result of my eyes being closed, but I didn't open them right away. I allowed this darkness to wash over me. And slowly I began to feel a natural kinship to the darkness that was all I could see. I didn't want to open my eyes. So instead, for now anyway, I chose to keep them closed.
I had more senses than just sight to guide me. Fearlessly, I opted to build an understanding of my surroundings by using my other senses.
I felt my nostrils flare as I tried to take in the things that surrounded me, without utilizing my eyes. The smells that filled my nostrils were astoundingly diverse. I could smell cobblestone, plants, rocks, and the assorted smells of other creatures nearby. I wasn't sure precisely ”how” I knew how things smelled, but I did. The knowledge was embedded within my mind, just like the knowledge of my senses and even parts of my body were embedded there, without explanation.
I strained my hearing, trying to silence the quite noises I made such as breathing or the slightest shuffling of my feet to gain a sense of what was occurring near me. The sounds I could hear ambiently were the sounds one heard when many different creatures were bunched together in a small space. I heard the unmistakable sounds of surprised gasping, of quickened heart-rates, of creatures taking steps back in surprise.
I also felt gazes upon me. Somehow I could sense that some creatures were staring at me in particular, even though such a sense was impossible to explain. That said, their gazes felt odd. I felt like one set of eyes in particular could see right through me, as if it belonged to someone whose senses extended beyond the physical and were more esoteric in nature.
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The devils who had been summoned to the temple silently admired the creations of their deity. Althos had an eye for beauty, if nothing else. Not a single one of his creations was ugly by any standard, though many of them were quite short for the tastes of the devils, who in every case at least among the present group of devils prefered to cavort and frolick with creatures of roughly human height.
Only one devil immediately noticed that one of his god's creations had kept her eyes shut. Althos also noticed this right away, but he observed it stoically, not revealing how the oddity made him feel, one way or another. The creature in question, the one who refused to open her eyes, was a dwarf.
She was a quiet brunette who had come into existence like the rest of her family: without any clothes. Her womanly body was on full display before the deity and everyone else whose bodies had been created at the same time as hers. Althos apathetically studied her, his eyes hiding his emotions as effectively as he hid his thoughts.
Over the course of the next few minutes the creations of the god began to truly come to life. They animated, ”coming to life” in a more metaphorically sense than was usually meant when referring to creations of gods, and began to converse with each other. Dwarves, dark-dwarves, and dark-elfs began to fraternize freely, speaking to each other without regrd for their differences in species, despite being aware that they were clearly members of different races.
The sight of this was greatly amusing to the quiet god. He allowed it to proceed uninterrupted while he silently examined some of his newer abiities.
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[Soul Domain Primary Passive Abilities:
Soul Weapon: Your soul-weapon becomes an artifact of yours, including counting as such for quests. It's properties are unique to you and your innate powers as a god. You can also cause others to spontaneously generate soul-weapons, which are invariably unique weapons that are difficult to damage and can only be truly destroyed by a higher being.
Enhanced Soul Aura: You gain the power to manifest your soul as a shield that will protect you from harm from attacks that aren't capable of at least destroying cities. Alternatively this power can manifest as a suit of armor-like energy.
Empathetic Soul: You can inflict emotions directly onto someone's soul, causing them to experience a life-changing quantity of the emotion. This allows you to overwhelm people with love, or other emotions you can manipulate.
Mortal Soul Mastery: This power lets you create souls appropriate for any kind of mortal body. Souls for mortal bodies you create can also hijack corpses and as a consequence of your powers over memories and parasites even parasitize the abilities, thoughts, secrets, and more of the deceased, all while fooling those who grieve for them into thinking the deceased individuals have come back to life.
Undead Soul Expert: This power lets you create souls appropriate for even the greater rungs of undead-kind you can create, such as death kings, liches, grim-reapers, and flesh-titans. This means that if you wish for it you can create greater undead without killing creatures.
Soul Destruction: You can destroy souls, in the same way as you could before, but now as a passive power.