Chapter 18: A Last Stand

Fen sat on a hilltop in the pouring rain, watching his death charging towards him. The cultists’ eyes were glowing a cold white, sending tiny flickers of lightning out the corners of their eyes as they moved. They were moving supernaturally fast, bolstered as they were by the storm Fen had been tricked into summoning, so he couldn’t get a good count on how many remained, but it likely didn’t matter anyway.

Fen struggled to prepare himself mentally for the coming fight as the hoard closed the distance. They were less than a mile away now.

Fen felt a tingle at the back of his mind, the feeling of a thought intruding into his mind. He looked frantically around, but could see nobody lurking among the nearby trees.

As Fen stopped to ponder the difference struck him. These weren’t normal thoughts, they were humongous, vastly different from the normal surface level urges and impulses he was used to reading. This mind was on an entirely different level, both in complexity and in sheer vastness.

As soon as that clicked, Fen understood what was going on.

“You.” Fen said.

The response didn’t come in words, but in lightning fast snippets of seemingly random things; images, sounds, smells, emotions, all mashed together in a city sized jumble of thinking. The thoughts of a deity.

They somehow meshed in Fen’s head, and though not quite language, Fen was still able to translate the message enough to understand it.

I have come to claim my people.

“Well, you’ll have to go through me.” Fen said. “I don’t intend to sit idly by while you destroy my home.”

This confuses me.

“What would you do if someone tried to take your home?” Fen asked. He was still staring out at the crowd of transformed cultists who were charging towards him.

Domination. Conquest. Power deserves the victory.

Fen shrugged. “I guess I can’t fault you too much for that.” Fen summoned his sword with a boom and a flash. “I’m still going to try to stop you.”

Why?

The question didn’t make much sense to him, so he said the only thing he could think to say. “It’s my home.”

A force slammed against Fen’s mind, and he was able to resist it for a bare moment before it shattered his mental defenses, throwing him down to the sodden grass. He was overrun and his mind was pulled away as his body was left behind on the forest floor.

As the pain cleared and Fen came back to himself he was standing atop the clouds, seeing the city of Unger sprawled out beneath him. It looked so much bigger from up here, dominating a huge portion of the landscape, and yet as he looked out and saw for miles and miles it put the city back in perspective, a tiny little blip on the world within its meager loop of wall.

Beside Fen was the god of the storm. The clouds swirled about him, cloaking and covering him, though Fen could still tell that his form was that of the large leader of the cultists, just made of pure light and swathed in dark stormy clouds.

“What do you see in this place?” The god demanded. “The people are… unworthy. They bicker endlessly, and they follow leaders who undermine them at every turn. Your King called me here to destroy his enemies in order to enrich himself, and your Queen saw that only as an opportunity to undermine him and obtain power for herself. It’s broken.”

Fen laughed. “You really don’t understand, do you?”

The god lashed out, flaying Fen’s mind with his power. “Don’t laugh at me!” He demanded.

Fen took a long time to recover. It felt as though his brain were bleeding, like if he put his hand up to his forehead his fingers would come away red. “I laughed because it’s sad.” Fen finally said. “You came here to conquer us, but you understand so very little about us.”

The god of the storm loomed large, lightning flashing around his hands, rain pelting with renewed force. He glared down at Fen and raised his hand to strike.

“We don’t keep going because our society is perfect.” Fen continued, ignoring the god’s wrath. “And we don’t argue just for the sake of it either. We live our lives down there because we love our home and the people that make it home. We argue because we care, and we follow our leaders because they’re what we’ve got.” Fen smirked, “and we occasionally do something to get rid of those leaders when they fail to meet our needs.”

The god paused in his anger, looking down at him. Looking down through Fen, he realized, weighing things in his glowing gaze.

The tension built until the storm god cocked his head, squinting down at Unger. “I see.”

Fen could vaguely feel the deific thoughts pouring off the figure, and he felt the moment a decision was made, though he was left guessing as to what the decision was.

Fen got to his feet, the roiling clouds surprisingly stable under his boots, though he could feel their motion. He looked the god directly in the eyes. “Leave my home alone.” He demanded.

Now it was the storm god’s turn to laugh, peals of thunder echoing the movement in the tempest below. “Who do you think you are to demand things of me?”

Fen summoned his sword, expecting a burst of light and sound, but instead a comfortable weight fell into his hand. Fen looked down with a start to find his normal sword, the one that had been taken from him when he was imprisoned by the cultists. “Start a fight against me and my people and I can promise you that it will not go the way you plan.”

The storm god laughed again, with less mirth this time. “You think to threaten me with a weapon I created?”

“Yup.” Fen said, projecting far more confidence than he felt. “I’ll threaten you with every single weapon at my disposal. Gods have been killed before. I’ll find a way to make it happen again.”

The storm below Fen’s feet shuddered for a moment, and Fen read the faintest glimmer of fear in the thoughts of the deity before it was scrubbed with curiosity.

The storm god laughed. “I’ll leave, but not for you. You have shown me that I have much to learn about humankind before I am ready to lead. You would die to save the very king you plan to depose. I have lived a hundred thousand of your lifetimes and never before encountered such a situation. A small delay will mean nothing if it grants me a new perspective.”

The vision blinked away, and Fen found himself back in his body, laying on the wet grass and staring up at the roiling clouds above.

The rain had stopped.

Fen leaped to his feet, looking down at the hoard of cultists below. They were running off to the west of Unger, the storm trailing after them.

Fen’s mind was reeling at what had just happened. Looking down at Unger below allowed Fen’s thoughts to circle back to the unfinished business he still had to deal with.