“I have sealed the damaged section of the ship, forbidding the Void,” Beltanus said. “Now we must kill it before it causes further harm. Danyil, equip him.”

  “Wait, why do I have to do it?” Telos knew he sounded like a petulant child, but he also thought it was a fair question, given he was new to the whole “being a god” thing. That still hasn’t sunk in. Apart from his sharpened senses, he did not feel much different. No grand epiphanies had warped the fabric of his thoughts. No spiritual insight had rendered his understanding of the world void. He was simply… more. In every sense of the word. Though he suspected it would be a long time before he understood the full extent.

  “Because I must steer this ship,” Beltanus growled, in answer. “Danyil will go with you.” Turning away from Telos, Beltanus focused on the viewing screen before him, directing the ship with his thoughts, so that it pivoted and arced, seeming to move in line with the curvature of the planet.

  I see the planet! I see the sphere of Erethia! He had seen diagrams, drawings, and models—and Telos now discovered they had been surprisingly accurate—but he looked upon the orb of Erethia with his own eyes as it floated in the blackness. His mind reeled. This was closer to spiritual epiphany. What forces keep such mighty planets aloft in this formless dark? Telos rarely exhibited piety, but he felt the awe coming on him like a tidal wave, and he could do little to gainsay it.

  Danyil had left and returned during the space of their brief interaction.

  “I’d hope to give you this with more ceremony,” the Sumyrian intoned. “But for now, we shall have to be perfunctory.”

  He placed a metal cylinder in Telos’s hands. Telos stared.

  “Run your fingers lightly along the haft,” Danyil instructed.

  Telos did so—and instantly two gleaming spear-points extended. The ringing noise they made as they cut the air itself sent a chill through his extremities. The balance of the weapon was sublime, simultaneously weighty enough to deal damage and light enough that he could twirl it with the ease of a baton. He performed a few tricks, delighted that his abnormal strength did not hamper his reflexes, but rather enhanced them. He smiled, thinking of his many friends in the circus, and how they would kill to get their hands on this. He looked at Danyil.

  “This is a Nilldorian sky-spear. Gifted to favoured humans, so I’m told.”

  Danyil smiled.

  “So you are not entirely godless, after all.”

  “No. Not entirely,” Telos said. “I enjoyed the old stories as a boy.” That was before he had seen his mother, before he had seen the truth that the fairy tale of his life was a fiction. Still, he had never believed the gods were fictions, no matter how outlandish the tales of their deeds seemed. And now I am walking among them. The truth is stranger than the stories.

  “The old stories always the truest,” Danyil replied. “Now, a good hero needs armour.”

  Telos agreed, for he had awoken in nothing but a plain white gown, the kind given to the plague victims who occupied the sick wards of Ereshian Temples. Danyil led him over to where a wall-compartment in the cockpit lay open, two huge suits of armour hanging there, each with a kind of glass visor. They were all of one piece, the texture of the material layered and gleaming, like dragonscale. Telos stared in wonder.

  “It looks like it weighs a ton.”

  There were tubes attached to the helmets, curling away like thick nests of gorgon hair and entering large backpacks made of metal. When Danyil took a suit down from its hanger, it crumpled and folded. Not armour at all, but something much softer like leather or scale-mail.

  “This protects against the void?” Telos said, uncertainly.

  Danyil nodded.

  “Do not doubt it. It is made from the flesh of a Nilldorian Hydra, and their scales are impervious to anything your world knows.” He handed it to Telos. Telos saw that there was some kind of moveable seam that allowed the suit to be sealed airtight. He stepped into the boots—which were lined with metal plating on the sole—and began to seal himself within. The scales felt odd against his skin, at once cooling and yet cloying, as though each scale welded itself to him.

  Danyil reached for the second suit. Telos raised an eyebrow.

  “Why are you surprised?” Danyil said, beginning to fit his long, slender limbs into the suit. They were sized for the Sumyrians, Telos realised, but his own suit had seemingly shrank to fit him.

  “Well, I saw you walk through fire when we first met,” Telos said. “Or was that a projection?”

  Danyil smiled mysteriously.

  “Indeed, that was a projection of magical art—which is not to say that some practitioners could not walk through the fire in truth.”

  “The ship hovered nearby,” Telos said. “Cloaked, somehow.”

  Danyil nodded. “And I sent forth my Shade to contact you.”

  “But you protected me,” Telos pressed. “I was unburned.”

  Danyil paused a moment.

  “Yes. Illusions, Telos, are much like dreams. Dreams seem unreal to the waking mind, and yet, when we are in the midst of them, they are realer than steel. Dreams can create not only psychological but physical anomalies.”

  Telos grinned. “Hence why the man who dreams he is in the arms of his lover…” He left the sentence unfinished.

  Danyil smiled back, showing that the gods and their children at least had some sense of humour.

  “A crude example, but precisely the case. Our sorcery is like a dream but amplified many times over. So, yes, you were unburned because my magic caused you to dream you were unburned.”

  “So it can effect reality directly?” Telos pressed. “That is more than mere illusion.”

  Danyil’s smile became wicked. “Surely, a man of your cunning would not insist upon one truth and one reality, Telos? Magic exists in the place in-between.”

  “Still, it is a powerful art.”

  “Indeed, which is why when it is used without careful control, it can carry a heavy toll on the caster. To cast a spell is to paint the art of the dream, to weave the dream, to evoke the dream. Those who can dream well shall be fine sorcerers. But doing so can ravage the one who is unprepared, who tries to grip the dream too tightly—for dreams have the habit of slipping through one’s fingers. Or turning into nightmares.”

  Telos shuddered. But despite this warning, he found himself asking, “Might you teach me?”

  “Perhaps,” Danyil said, which actually surprised Telos, who had been expecting an outright rejection. “But it may be your mind is much too… pragmatic for such things.”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  “Fair point. We shall have to see.”

  With that, both Telos and Danyil donned their helmets. Telos expected this would cut off communication between them, but to his surprise, he found Danyil’s voice speaking clearly in his head, seemingly emanating from within the helmet itself.

  “Come, let us face your first Daimon.”

  Telos shuddered again, but followed Danyil out of the cockpit and down yet more long, corridors. One thing that struck Telos was how devoid of adornment the ship’s interior was. He’d expected the floating palaces of the gods to be baroque masterpieces, citadels as luxuriously carved and ornamented as the temples dedicated in their name, but they were horridly utilitarian, reminding him of a cleaner version of the prison of Ob-koron where his adventure had begun.

  At last, they arrived at a huge metal door—more like the gate to some iron golem’s fortress it was so vast and thick. Though, like the rest of the shop, without symbol, sign, or decoration. Danyil paused.

  “Beyond this shield door lies the Daimon. Ready your spear.”

  Telos noted Danyil bore no weapon, but he assumed the trickster had magic up his sleeve. Telos took a deep breath. The air in his suit was clean enough, but muggy, as though it had been breathed and re-breathed several times. Perhaps the suit recycles the ai?, he thought.

  Danyil reached out for the door.

  Then time stopped.

  Telos gasped as he felt some invisible lance perforate his mind. He cried out, staggered, dropping his spear to the ground. He clutched his helmet. Pain blossomed between his ears and eyes, as though a worm had bored their through the plate of his skull, devouring the creamy tissue of his brain.

  What is this? a voice whispered. Mortal, yet with the stink of filthy Nilldoran about you. Could this be… a hybrid?

  Telos felt terror coursing through his veins. The Daimon is speaking to me. The Daimon is in my thoughts.

  Laughter answered his panicked realisation.

  Yes. It is no matter to cross this threshold of metal. I had not intended to commune with you but with your master… But perhaps this is fortuitous.

  Telos writhed in agony. His mind raced and he tried to catch his thoughts, to seal them up before they appeared, lest the Daimon read him. He cursed this turn of events, for now the enemy knew part of Beltanus and Danyil’s plan.

  Enemy? The Daimon purred. Am I truly your enemy, Telos Daggeron? Consider this: the gods tried to extinguish us. And now, they are trying to extinguish you. We are more alike than we are different. The Cursed Shapers know no bounds of ego. They remake the world as they see fit, caring nothing for the lives they destroy in the process.

  Telos’s body turned cold, even within the insulating suit of armour. Danyil was shouting at him, trying to get his attention, but a wall of pale, shimmering noise separated Telos from his own senses. Danyil’s mouth moved but only a vague, warbling sound without meaning escaped, unable to perforate the psychic barrier that now existed around Telos, like the walls of a prison cell. Just us two inmates, Telos thought.

  He felt the Daimon’s pleasure.

  Indeed. Just us two. And indeed, we have a lot in common. We have both suffered the vicissitudes of the so-called gods. You experienced the Black Fires of Nereth. The Rynudom. And I have lain dormant for four-thousand years, broken beyond your comprehension… Until now!

  There was a sudden surge of light, energy, and pain. Telos screamed. Imagery flooded his mind as though an unseen culvert had been opened, and the filth of centuries, long restrained, gushed without filter into his mind. He writhed and jerked like an insect on the ground as every atom of his mind was drenched in the bile of memories—memories of the Daimon.

  ***

  Erethia lay barren, fallow. The first tree was yet to poke its head through the soil. Yet, there were creatures. Ugly, beetle-like things, scurrying along the wet mulch of the primordial soil. And there was life in the waters too, a fizzling, ecstatic life that had no fixed form, that hummed and sprouted and danced. As one of the cumbersome beetles slouched past, the life in the water shot out, attaching itself. The beetle twitched, spasmed, then went very still. Slowly, it turned its eyes to the dawn—and it knew what it was it beheld. There and then the first word was uttered, though silently in the palace of mind.

  The word was beauty. And it was pronounced Daimon.

  Time slurred. The beetle aged, withered, then reproduced, its young all bearing this new spark of mind. Time moved faster still, and Telos realised he was not seeing the passage of centuries or even millennia, but millions of years. That is how long the Daimons have been here. That is how long they have possessed Erethia…

  There were many minds now, all conjoined. And the bodies they inhabited had changed too, growing first more like arachnids: agile, venomous, cunning, able to make webs and lairs. Then they wgrew wilder still. Now, they were able to reshape their forms, to grow them with harvested energy, to create strange beauties that resembled no animal Telos could name. In winters, they clad themselves in furs. In the wild of summer, they roamed over the plains, the sole horns on their heads glinting like crystals of adamant.

  Change, change, change. Other things arose from the muck of opportunity, living on Erethia. The soil and waters and skies were giving birth to endless varieties. But in the heart of all things dwelt the Daimons, the secret shape-shifters, the bearers of the Mind. Telos only glimpsed parts of the next phase of their existence, but he saw towers, citadels, the sun setting over cloud-borne cities. He gasped in wonder.

  And then came shadows in the sky.

  Burning ships. Meteoric descent.

  He recognised one of the gods, though back then, he had been more organic than machine. Almost handsome, with proud, dark features. A full-lipped mouth curved in a smile. His muscles forever twitching as though he itched to return to the forge. What came next, Telos could not endure nor contemplate, and it seemed the Daimon understood this, for time spurred on again, so fast that only the brief dream-flashes reached him. Burning fields. Crumbling cities. Bodies piled high. Pestilences that blasted the surface of the planet. Icy winds, manufactured by hideous machines, that turned the northern crown of Erethia into a cruel glacier. The wars of men were tragic, but the war of the gods and the Daimons were pure horror.

  And then came an end. Here, the Daimon slowed to allow Telos to savour the dark terror. A flower bloomed in the sky, a rupture of orange-white light. Yet, this was not molten light, not the effluence of a volcano, but something stranger. The particles of this eruption were living, moving. They scattered as the flowerbloom reached its apex and showered the world with pollen. The touch of it! Gods, I can feel the agony even now! Even through translated memory! Oh Gods! The kiss of those particles was beyond understanding, a scalpel inserted into every atom of his being, but deeper even than that: a scalpel into the soul. He felt his soul excised, dragged from the incised corpse, wrenched from the body. Mind, divorced. Mind, severed. The flesh cast away like plague rags to be incinerated. The spirit left to drift, like mercury through The Palace of Eternal Dreams.

  And a new word rose within, a word of dread and awe and wonder and horror and torment.

  Nergal.

  With a start, the vision ended. Telos lay on the ground. The wall of bright sound still separated him, but he could feel the connection was about to be severed.

  Now you see. Now you know our plight. Consider, Telos Daggeron, whether we are the enemy, after all.

  The mind-link cut off, and Telos sprang to his feet. Dizziness struck him and he nearly fell.

  “Telos! What happened?” Danyil cried.

  “I… I…”

  An alarm blared. The ship juddered. A voice sounded through the ship, projected by some unseen machine.

  “The Daimon has abandoned us. It has thrown itself from the ship!”

  The god sounded surprised. Telos breathed a sigh of relief, for he would not have to fight the Daimon, but Danyil had turned pale.

  “What is it, Danyil?” Telos asked.

  “Where are we, Beltanus?” Danyil said, ignoring him.

  “We are over the coast of Aurelia,” Beltanus said, grimly. “It seems the Daimon is leading us to a populated area.”

  Telos felt his heart stutter in his chest. He was still reeling from the revelations and thoughts the Daimon had impressed upon him. He had seen the birth of the planet, or near enough. He had seen things no mortal should ever lay eyes on. It was too much… And yet he wanted to see more, to know more. It is a trick, Telos. A trick to turn you. But he could not deny that he now saw things differently, saw the Daimon’s plight. Did any species have the right to extinguish another?

  “We must return to the cockpit, Telos,” Danyil said, gripping his shoulders. The Sumyrian’s face was at once compassionate and concerned. Did he suspect what was shown to me? This cannot be the first time the Daimons have tried to turn someone? Yet, perhaps it was. The Daimons had fought very differently then to now. The vision had impressed more than simply what was shown to him; he had picked up hidden thoughts within the Daimon as the mind-link deepened. This time things will be different, the Daimon had thought. This time we shall not make the same mistake and fight openly. We shall fight the secret war, fight in the hearts and minds—where we are strongest!

  Telos shivered, but allowed himself to be guided back to the cockpit. Once there, Beltanus began the ship’s descent, hurtling back towards Erethia to try and catch the Daimon before it was too late.