The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

“Come forth, Hydrujan scum! Your doom is upon you!!!”

The mighty roar of challenge echoed over the marbled balconies, carven sculptures, and tiled floors. The ornate tapestries and hangings fluttered, and the fluted ceilings and columned walls trembled, but there was no other response.

“Cowards! Vermin! You think to hide from me, from the justice you’ve long avoided?! Gorr the God-Butcher has come for you, you cannot hide from my wrath!”

Cold winds chased through the mountainside palaces and balconies, the echoes of his crushing blow against the polished floors faded away, and still there was silence.

Fuming at having to chase his prey down, Gorr strode forwards, the flaming black Sword in his massive hand eagerly sniffing for signs of the gods they’d come to punish properly for their faithlessness and empty hearts.

There was still no one and nothing to answer them, although some sights did give Gorr pause.

The first time he saw the cut slicing through all the statues to the Hydrujan’s vanity, he paused, tracking the arc of it, and then striding over to where some robes had been bisected upon the ground.

Robes... and ornate armor of godly design. Within them was nothing but dust.

Here and there, shattered and tumbled, empty suits of armor and weapons in the mold of the carvings on the wall, sometimes in numbers... the divine guardians of the gods, those rare souls elevated and tasked to guard and slave away for their divine masters for eternity, now also shattered, destroyed, and reduced to naught with their masters.

It was a surreal feeling for Gorr. Combat with the divine, even when he severely out-matched them, tended to be destructive and very hard on the environment, yet this killing had taken place clinically and precisely, giving the targets of the killing no opportunity to wreak havoc on their divine home, nor to flee.

They had been cut down without mercy...

---

Gorr’s steps finally carried him up to the grandest palace, highest upon the celestial peak here, overdecorated in skysilver and gold, a gleaming monument to the ego of the Skyfather who led this pantheon of divinities.

A whole section of the building had been chopped away as smoothly as butter. Gorr could not help but look over the edge of the wide arching bridge leading up to the palace, and see the trail of wreckage and scars it had left as it fell down the mountain into the mists below. Where it landed in the mortal world below might become a blessed or cursed ground, depending on the foolishness or wisdom of the mortals below, who realized what it might portend.

There was more ambient damage here; craters in floors and holes in walls, statuary blown apart, doors riven, ceilings collapsed. Scattered were the remains of gleaming armor, weapons, and shields, the vast majority from minions, but some scattered fallen here and there with the special gleam about them of divinely-powered items.

Many of them were chopped in twain dismissively, be they Armor, Weapons, or Shields, their fading glows and hissing, frail sparks indicating how scornfully they’d been destroyed.

Gorr gripped his burning black Blade uncertainly and continued forward, towards the throne room and audience chamber of vaunted Kiljos the All-Mighty, Skyfather of the Hydrujan Pantheon, strongest and most powerful of his kind.

He saw motion ahead and paused in his steps.

A woman was coming down the cracked white steps ahead of him. A circle of space was floating in the air next to her, and she was glancing back and forth. As she did, she was stripping the palace clean about her.

Gold and mithral were peeled off the walls. Divine armaments tumbled through the air and vanished into that circle. Gems and jewels cracked off the hardened stone of the walls and flitted through the air, vanishing within the rift.

He sneered for a moment, watching her loot this building clean. She obviously did not care for the tales and stories engraved on the walls in tribute to Kiljos’ might, tearing the metals and precious stones from them, even as she scooped up the remnants of the gods and minions who had died here with equal callousness.

He also saw her eyes skip right over him, as if he were not worth acknowledging, and despite himself, his hackles all rose.

There was no sign of ignorance in that flitting gaze. She had set eyes on him, and dismissed him as a threat to her.

The Necrosword, a Weapon made to kill gods, seemed to tremble for a moment in his grasp, an odd sensation he had never felt before.

“I am Gorr the God-Butcher!” he called out proudly as she came down the steps, and the remnants of a pantheon ripped themselves away from around her and poured into the circle of space at her side. “Who are you?” he challenged her.

The heavens-blue eyes returned to him, the core of a wild beauty marred by a fell scar of some magical Curse of origin unapparent to him. She moved with a dancer’s grace and a killer’s control, and he could feel the Aura about her, laden with Death’s own direct touch, and incredible killing stillness and emptiness.

A Courtier of Death. Someone who had killed gods and mortals, and earned Her own attention for so doing. Even the Necrosword could respect such a being...

“I am Sama Rantha, called by some the Golden Hag. You are a bit late to the party, God Butcher, as I’ve left nothing for you to do here. You can take yourself and your Void-wrought Sword elsewhere. When I’m done looting this damn place, I’ll collapse this celestial plane down and the Hydrujans can fall into the pits of obscurity forever.”

Gorr stared at her as she continued about her looting, completely unconcerned with his presence. “You... are not a god,” he finally judged her, watching her at work. “Why did you come here?”

“The Hydrujans were on the edge of the incoming invasion breach from the Negative Zone. They elected to abandon their faithful and sent envoys to treat with the invaders, thinking to join the winning side of the conflict and enjoy great battles and hunts in an epic celestial war against other gods and powers as they did so.

“I eliminated them as the traitors to the universe they were.” Metal peeled smoothly off the walls, foil and leaf that should have taken much scraping, and was simply yanked off in toto and disappeared into the spatial rift beside her, without her taking much of a glance at them. “What brought you here?”

“The Hydrujans ignore the calls and prayers of their own people, yet dare to call themselves the only gods of the mortals below!” He raised the Necrosword, which seemed to burn blacker as it recognized its purpose being invoked. “I came to give them a taste of their own indifference!”

“Demanding worship and not completing the cycle of faith is indeed a betrayal of the compact between divine and mortals, and sadly enough, as common as the reverse is,” she conceded, not stopping her progress and walking right past him as the palace tore itself apart around him. Despite himself, he moved to pace her, finding himself completely unnerved by her indifference to himself and the danger he represented.

He felt a surge of incredible power, and the throne room beyond collapsed in a roar of artful stone and sundered magic, streams of energy joining the metals and gems as the divine power invested in this place was ripped free of the stone and taken away as surely as the metalwork and divine trophies.

“All gods are cowards and leeches upon the mortal world!” he proclaimed, shaking the Necrosword, and that earned him another slow glance from her.

“That is not true, that is your Sword speaking for you. It was wrought to kill all gods, not merely the faithless wretches among them. Have you fallen to the will of your Sword?”

Despite himself, he stopped in place, having a sense of immense danger rising next to him as she kept on. The black flames on the Necrosword seemed to gutter and shrink.

“Knull is your creator, is he? Sitting out alone there in the Void, thinking only of being alone again and bringing down all that brought the light of life to interrupt his darkness and solitude. Surprised and killed a Celestial, and wrought you from a shard of its armor, did he?” Gorr blinked, looking down at his Weapon, never having heard any of this before. “Mind your manners. Carving through the armor of a Celestial is not that hard, and I have no love for things of Oblivion, opposed as you are to ALL that live.”

Her taloned finger pointed up at Gorr’s face. “You wield a Weapon of Oblivion and the Void. It has given you great power, and perhaps you think you are its master.

“You are not. As long as you serve its purpose, it will allow you to use it. Killing faithless gods is fine by its measure, but its true goal is the extinguishing of all life and light, and a return to the endless darkness. As you are a living thing, that includes you.”

Gorr felt his hackles rise. He knew that he was bound to the Sword, and if he let it go, he would lose most or all of his power.

“I imagine it has been consuming the divine power of the gods you have slain, instead of letting it flow through to you and making you their successor. At least, I sense very little such power upon you, although your Aura reeks with the death of divine beings.”

“Divine... power?” Gorr repeated, finding his feet dragging him after her, despite the very sudden threat she represented. He had killed Skyfathers before, and never had he felt so cautious before them as he did of the scarred female in front of him.

“Surely you’re aware that most divine pantheons have stories of killing their elders and taking their places. The power of gods flows through to their slayers who succeed them. If that would have made you a god of god-slaying, so be it. But it appears your Sword wants to keep you dependent upon it. Acting like a jealous god who will only permit you to serve it and accept what gifts it chooses to give you, despite any and all offerings, is it?”

The barbed remark wormed its way right into his soul with searing clarity.

He was a slave to the Sword. Without him, it could do nothing but wait for another to wield it. Without it, he could not achieve his goal of bringing judgement to the gods who were exploiting mortals.

And yet, it would not allow him to grow strong enough to be able to complete his quest without it. It would not allow him, a mortal, to rise to be able to challenge it!

His hands opened almost compulsively. The black flames on the Sword went out, and it fell to the ground with a muted clang.

Sama Rantha stopped and turned around slowly, her eyes zeroing in on the deathly black Weapon now that it was out of his hand. The energy being torn out of the walls and buildings about her seemed to freeze in place, and then abruptly diverted, as if it had sensed a new destination more amenable to it.

Gorr had felt the shadowy power of the Necrosword starting to boil out of him, leaving behind it the crippling weakness of mortality and the looming shadow of his lengthened years. He knew his quest was undone, and without the Sword, he could not have continued.

But now, the power was being replaced. Replaced by the power of the gods he despised so much!

He wanted to fight it, but the need for the power to take his revenge, and the yawning weakness of the Necrosword’s power leaving him left him shaking with the need for the strength he was gaining from it.

There was a crunching clang of protest, two Notes ringing ding! ting! incredibly sharp and brittle to his ears, and as the godly power flowed into him, he looked down to see a golden-edged blue-black Sword, wrought so perfectly his newly-divine senses leapt to behold the craftsmanship in it, had come down and literally split the Necrosword in half from hilt to point.

Caught helpless in the torrent of divine power, he could only watch silently, his hands still as the thought of his enslavement to the Sword rose up in front of him. Despite all their killing together, it was his hatred of that feeling of enslavement from something mighty, a callous indifference to the true wants and needs of their lessers, that drove him, and the thought that the Sword there was just like them, and was going to use him up and then kill him when he had served his purpose, just like his gods had...

Ding! Ting! The Sword came down again, and cut across the dark Blade, severing the halves from the split hilt of the Necrosword.