The Cycle of False Death
Scene 1
I took the initiative first.
My shield rose in front of me as I charged the Ice Wolf, using my momentum to ram into her before she could fully dissolve into the battlefield.
At the same time, Pluto cut across the Sun Wolf's fur.
It yelped.
Good.
Pain meant the beasts were still grounded enough to be taught.
The Moon Beast answered by blasting my shield with ice, trying to freeze the searing flames coating its surface. For a brief moment, I paused.
Not from danger.
From realization.
The flames threatened her ability to shift states.
If she turned fully into snow beneath my fire, she risked being melted. If she remained solid, she became easier to strike.
So I forced the flames to come alive.
They crawled across the shield like hungry serpents, eating away the snow and ice laws clinging to the battlefield. The Moon Wolf responded quickly, burying herself in more snow and reinforcing the environment with her own Laws. She was not advanced enough to create a battlefield from nothing, but she understood how to use what already existed.
The snow burned.
The cold pushed back.
A balance formed.
Then pressure descended from the universe itself.
I felt it immediately and forced the temperature down.
The pull of the Sun remained active.
That proved the star still possessed its stellar heart.
The very object Artemis and I had been racing toward.
By the terms of our agreement, ownership would be decided by where the heart was housed once claimed. Which meant if I reached it first, I won by default.
Artemis would hate that.
I swung Pluto and coated the blade in black flames.
The sword split a pillar of fire launched by the Sun Wolf, then chained that force into a wave of flame aimed directly toward the Moon Wolf.
She retreated.
For the first time, the terrain betrayed her.
Her hunting ground burned away with every clash. The more I fought her brother, the more heat spilled into her domain. Her fur had already begun shedding from the rising temperature, and every patch of ice she used to hide became thinner.
What should have been her hunting ground was becoming my battlefield.
At the same time, I limited my use of direct Solar Laws.
Too much, and the universe would notice.
Too little, and these two would regain control.
So I changed my expression of Darkness instead.
Not concealment.
Not fear.
Burning.
A Darkness that scorched anything incapable of understanding it on my level.
That was the privilege of outranking gods.
These two remained Peak Minor God beasts, yet their physical use of Laws made them more dangerous than many Major Gods within the Greek Pantheon. They did not think through Laws.
They lived them.
That made them wild.
And wild things punished distraction.
The Snow Wolf struck while my thoughts shifted.
Her claw landed cleanly against my ribs.
Golden blood spilled down my side.
Both wolves froze.
Then went mad.
The hunger in their eyes sharpened beyond instinct.
My blood carried too much.
Solar essence.
Death.
Darkness.
Stellar refinement.
The flavor of a Golden Cycle god moving beyond his assigned frame.
Even Greek Gods would devour me for the chance to seize those Domains if they believed they could survive the attempt.
The Sun Wolf reacted worse than his sister.
He lunged forward, trying to outgrow me and swallow me whole before sanity could return.
A mistake.
My hand caught his neck.
I grew faster than he did, using the Sun Essence he had devoured against him. The ownerless solar authority inside his body resisted for a breath before I branded it with the imprint of my Dark Sun.
Mine.
The Sun Wolf choked.
Then I slammed both fists into the top of his head.
The entire field cracked beneath the impact.
He collapsed unconscious.
One down.
I turned toward the Moon Wolf.
"I cannot refine this one with the Death Sword," I muttered. "Hel still has my Life Sword."
The Moon Wolf lowered herself, growling.
"So a beating it is."
I drove Pluto into the ground.
If I intended to tame both, I could not dominate her the same way I had dominated her brother. The Sun Wolf had been vulnerable to my Dark Sun. The Moon Wolf required something else.
Darkness took over as my main Domain.
I coated my hands with Force and allowed the quiet nature of Darkness to settle over that blank slate.
Force became pressure.
Darkness became silence.
Together, they formed gauntlets of shadow around my fists.
I stepped forward.
Flames erupted beneath my feet, launching me toward her.
Her paw rose by instinct and collided with my first punch.
She stopped one fist.
Only one.
My second fist slammed into her side.
She howled in pain before I followed with a kick that lifted her entire body from the ice. Then I drove my fist down, smashing her head into the frozen ground.
Her tail hardened with ice and whipped toward my neck.
I broke it with a shadow-covered fist.
The Moon Wolf shrieked.
I raised one finger and drew in the air.
Darkness followed the motion.
A circle.
A mark.
A closing sky.
I used Darkness to swallow the Moon.
The wolf lashed out with everything she had left, ice and moonlight erupting from her body in a final struggle.
I stepped through it.
Then slammed my palm against her forehead.
Her Divine Mark of the Moon surfaced beneath my hand.
I enclosed it in Darkness.
Her mind shut down instantly.
Silence settled.
Both wolves lay defeated, their Domains invaded and marked by me.
The devourers had been reversed.
They would not consume me.
I would keep them.
Pets, technically.
Also the only reasonable way to appease Artemis once she realized she had slept through the end of the journey.
Scene 2
I placed both wolves inside my Grotto Heaven under Thor's watch.
He had agreed not to slaughter them.
A generous compromise.
Afterward, I continued through the frozen city, taking in the buildings one by one. Some were too valuable to leave behind. So I did not.
The larger palaces were uprooted and placed inside the grasslands of my Grotto Heart.
As a newly established Major God, my Grotto Heart could begin housing life-forms properly. In time, it would function like a minor world of its own. The biomes of such inner worlds were usually dictated by the Laws of the owner's Domain.
Mine had already achieved a strange balance.
Life and Death.
Sun and Darkness.
The Primal Four beginning to form inside the stolen World Tree core would serve as vessels within my Grotto Heart, helping jumpstart those Laws properly. In turn, they would partner with the World Tree of the Dark Sun as it began creating its own Primal Four elements.
That would eliminate the need to hunt divine beasts of equal rank later, at least for the first stage.
Once the Sky Pillar finished cementing itself between Abi and the place Ayin would inherit if she agreed, the foundation would become far cleaner.
The Aesir decorative style also had value.
Warrior temples.
Training halls.
Rune-carved armories.
All of it could be transplanted into the City of Hades.
If my goal was to surpass every other mortal faction, then the Aesir way of weapon-making and systematic magic would go far with mortals.
Whether through runic language, law-tapping, or combat rituals, their methods were scalable.
That mattered.
Unlike many Greek paths, the Aesir did not rely solely on strong elemental affinity. Their lack of natural specialization forced them to pursue combat, structure, and simpler methods of reaching divinity.
Thor was the exception.
A Lightning Giant with Earth as well.
Yet even his Domains had shifted toward a kingly variant after discarding pure violence. Blood still clung to his hammer, but his temperament no longer matched the conquest recorded on these walls.
Some of the murals told those older stories.
Thor's conquest across the Nine Realms.
Odin beside him.
A father and son forcing a universe under their heel.
False worship named Odin SkyFather.
Then AllFather.
A recycled title each Odin seemed to find and mistake for a final answer.
He stepped directly into Fate's trap the moment he slew only one of the Primal Titans.
Ymir died and became the foundation of Midgard through the World Tree.
But Surtur remained alive.
Angry.
Unanswered.
The twin spirit left burning after Ymir's body became land.
That was the first imbalance.
One never corrected.
Prophecy then gripped everyone, even the AllFather, with fear of a weakened Titan whose best chance had already passed when the other Primals struck.
I ran my hand along the mural, piecing together the story of this bygone cycle.
Loki.
Adopted son of Odin.
For all he was worth, he had still been a True Vessel of this pantheon's Chaos.
Tormented by the creation of beings capable of destroying the Nine Realms.
First came Hel.
She was accepted at first because she looked Aesir enough.
Then came her middle brother, Fenrir.
Odin eventually found the wolf living in a forest Loki had blessed to divert gods away from it. Loki had tried to hide his son from Fate by never showing him the world.
It only made the hunt worse.
Because Fate had not accounted for Fenrir properly, the search became a Chaos hunt.
A correction.
Fenrir died before he ever struck a god.
Before he even harmed Tyr, who killed him.
Then came the youngest.
Leviathan.
He witnessed everything.
He devoured Fenrir and Fenrir's two children, hiding them inside himself before submerging into the seas, never to be seen again until the destined day of destruction.
He preserved them.
But preservation twisted into torment.
The two wolves festered inside him, trapped in inherited rage. By the time they were released, they tore through his insides and killed him for the sacrifice he had made.
Children trapped in rage.
A parent trapped in desperation.
A family turned into prophecy.
Surtur and the other races that stood against Odin used their chance when Asgard grieved the loss of Baldur.
Baldur.
The people's chosen heir.
The younger brother of Thor and Loki.
His death fractured the empire more than any enemy army could.
Loki offered Thor a way out.
Thor missed his Fate of dying alongside Leviathan because he refused to hunt the beast if it meant repeating Fenrir's tragedy.
Loki's side of the story was missing from these halls.
Of course it was.
Victors wrote murals.
Survivors hid truth.
I could only guess whether Loki still lived somewhere in depression, or whether his own descendants had already struck him down.
Either choice would fit.
Especially after Thor escaped the path laid out for him.
Scene 3
I stepped through the open gate of the largest palace and ignored the gaze watching me from the throne.
Not yet.
Once certain actions were taken, I would lose the chance to gather resources.
So first, I inspected everything.
The library came first.
I did not bother reading it.
I uprooted the entire structure and placed it inside my Grotto Heart.
The armory followed.
Then the treasury.
Then a silver palace of lesser quality than the others, though still too valuable to abandon.
By the time I was finished, most of the palace grounds had been stripped clean.
Except the gate.
And the path beneath me.
I glanced down at the bridge-like road under my feet.
Then shook my head.
No.
Even I had limits.
Taking the very symbol of this Domain's rainbow bridge felt like asking for a second disaster before the first one finished collapsing.
Only after that did I enter the main hall.
The palace had clearly been built for gods and giants alike. Even at my enlarged size, the halls accepted me without resistance.
Lavish was too weak a word.
Everywhere else in the realm had been dying beneath ice and neglect.
Here, gold still shone.
Here, conquest had preserved its ego until the end.
I entered the throne room.
Six thrones.
Two occupied.
The fourth seat held an empty shell of a being.
Teeth marks covered the neck.
A tragic end delivered by his own descendants.
At the head sat an elderly man holding a spear lazily across his lap.
His breathing came slow.
Painfully slow.
He was dying.
No.
My senses dug deeper.
He was holding back the final step of his realm's natural rebirth.
If he let go, the story would reset. His memories would be wiped clean. His cycle would try again without him carrying this failure forward.
So he refused.
Even now.
"I was once called wise," the old man said.
I stopped below his throne and compressed my body until our eyes met cleanly.
"Now I feel like the greatest fool."
His single eye lifted toward me.
"That seal was supposed to keep everyone out and in unless it was me."
For a split second, his eye lit with old anger.
Then he calmed.
"Yet you smell like one of those three brats from Chronos."
The temperature dropped.
His body forced itself upright on the throne.
"So tell me, little Greek god—how does one of you possess my essence?"
I had no answer ready.
Then the shadow of white light materialized in front of Odin.
Not behind me.
Not beside me.
From me.
My soul.
The part of me that wore Odin's shape without being this Odin.
The mortal Odin layer.
The seeker who had gone farther than the AllFather before us ever managed.
"Does a dying man ask for water when he is already mortally wounded?" it asked.
Odin stared at the White Light.
Then his face twisted.
"No," he said. "But a dying man would still like to know who his opponent was."
His grip tightened around the spear.
"Yet I am only angered by such a ridiculous answer. Then you gave it up? Mortals are the worst scu—"
"Keep that tongue, old man," the White Light snapped, "unless you want to lose it."
The throne room trembled.
"I am not as forgiving as your sons," it continued. "Nor did I purposely enter your game. Just like the rest of my generation."
Its voice sharpened.
"Yet I am the only one who reached the answer you sought and still intend to give it away to the future."
Odin's spear trembled in his hand.
"What would you know, old demon of foolish ways?"
The White Light smiled.
"What? Did you think I would not understand the name I took?"
The air became unbearably still.
"I understand you better than the rest."
Then it stepped closer.
"You only drank from the well."
The spear launched from Odin's hand.
Before he could react, it landed in mine.
A living node of this universe.
Its direct command point.
The White Light's final words echoed through the throne room.
"I dove into the sea of it."
Odin's body slumped in his seat.
Whatever passed between them sentenced him to his final journey.
The realm shuddered.
I stood alone with too many questions and no time to answer them.
If I wanted the stellar heart, I had to move now.
I flew out of the throne room, uprooted the palace itself, and launched toward the Sun.
The void around me began shattering.
The ice that had once held this universe together cracked across every direction.
The Universe Will no longer possessed enough gods, resources, or structure to restart properly.
It was collapsing inward.
I aimed for the door and treasure of the realm.
The blue-white star opened before me.
I entered as the universe collapsed behind me.
Only by a hair's breadth did I reach the core in time.
"Open."
The stellar heart obeyed.
A doorway tore outward into the Star Realm.
I left the Cycle of False Death behind.
Broken stars filled my vision.
For the first time since entering that frozen hell, they looked almost welcoming.
Then I remembered Hastur's warning.
His kin and worse things lingered near fallen zones like this.
So I forced myself to focus and flew toward my own pantheon without looking back.