and lord, I fashion dark gods too;
There is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad --
And it seems indeed that their great architect has gone mad, for the world around them shrieks and falls to the screeching demands of their land, their great mother, who has turned upon them, who punishes them for taking what she had once offered.
Oh, he feels the pull, gnarled fingers tugging at his skin as he saunters from the mountain, he feels a lead weight settle in his belly. But he fights it. Once, perhaps, he had things owed to the land, the same way he was once birthed to a woman.
Both those things were many iterations ago.
Now, he has surpassed such things – he, their dark god, their cosmic master, who has died and come back tenfold, who has consumed alive the magic of a dozen other creatures. He is no longer chained to Beqanna.
She is a goddess, they say; but he is a god.
They are immovable force and unstoppable object, meeting, colliding.
And yes, sometimes he feels sick, an odd and dizzying sensation (he is not used to mortal ills, has not known them for centuries), an odd uneasiness of the stomach that his power seems unable to touch. And yes, sometimes his god’s magic doesn’t work as anticipated – misaimed, or misdirected, or not exactly what he’s called forth – but he dismisses it. He’s sure it will pass, in time, as his own strength overcomes the lands.
What’s most insulting, he finds (for he doesn’t care about the others, let them lose their traits, live naked and helpless like newborn mice), is the way the lands are destroyed – burnt and gone, collapsed. Yet this
goddess - she dangles new lands before them, yet makes them
beg for them, grovel like worms.
(Disgusting. He is the only one they should kneel before.)
He knows he cannot be the only one appalled by this. So he calls out. He wonders if any of his devoted are left, the few he’s branded. He knows there are legions of sons and daughters, but truth is, he does not expect much loyalty from his blood.
Still. He calls.
“My friends,” he says, and a snake’s smile is on his gruesome lips, “your darling home has taken what you have so rightly earned. And now she makes you beg and grovel just to have what once was yours given back. A cowardly, foolish move.”
And does the land shake under his feet, or does he imagine it? Never mind. He goes on.
“But gods are gods,” he continues, “and I have not been defeated.”
(Never mind the way he feels slightly feverish. Never mind.)
“She took from you,” he says, “and I am here to help you take it back.”
He says this as if he is a generous man. A selfless one. Never mind he needs them, needs their loyalty to do what he is planning.
(Needs a sacrificial lamb, perhaps. Or two. Or a dozen. Needs a test subject. Never mind the fever. Never mind.)
“I force no one into this. You may leave now. You may pledge me your loyalty for only a few weeks, or even days. But you have been wronged, and I am here to right things.”
As if he has ever righted anything. A god’s mind is a strange and terrible place to me.
“My name is Carnage,” he says, as if they do not know his name, “and I am here to reclaim what is mine. What is
ours.”
c a r n a g e
