Chapter 26 - The Constants of Eight Gods

Kaya held her dagger at him.

“Down with your weapons, Eternal Flame. You escaped quicker than I thought you would. Was my daughter adequately kind to you all?”

Daughter?

I thought for a moment, thinking of who he could be talking about.

I looked at him.

I pictured Inda.

They looked nothing alike.

Aqlli saw my confusion, looked away from me and spoke.

“I’m Inda’s third father. The first was her biological father, a busy fool in the Zibernetikan government. She rarely saw him until his death. Inda was only four when she was transferred to the custody of the Prime Minister of Zibernetika. A scumbag ruler that died by my hand. He was barely a father to her. He didn’t care for her freedom. He even brought her to the battlefield during the war of salvation. He stood there, facing me, with the crying child by his side. So, naturally, I disposed of him and took Inda under my custody.”

He turned his head back to me and stared dead in my eyes.

“If you answered her question with the slightest hint of idiocy, your head wouldn’t be attached to your shoulders right now. You did well enough.”

Ame raised his hand.

“Aqlli! What do you mean by her ‘illness’?”

He stared back at Ame and grit his teeth.

“World Cage Disease. I won’t say anything else. You’re pushing it.”

My mind was too fuzzy to understand what he just said. I felt like I remembered it from somewhere.

Ame lowered his hand.

Aqlli began walking forward and spoke without looking towards us.

“You’re coming to my office.”

Nobody else said anything, so I followed him along with everybody else.

We walked through the streets of Cittaglia while all the citizens stared at us. The streets were lined with unlit lamp posts and light fog. There was little grass or trees around, instead being replaced with large spiked rocks. The buildings rose high above the ground until we reached our destination.

In front of us stood a colossal castle with stained glass windows and sharp points sticking off of the roof.

Aqlli simply walked through the gate without speaking to his guards, and brought us inside. I was a little bit too nervous to speak, so I just looked around as he dragged us to his office.

He shut the door behind him as we all sat in front of his mini-throne.

“Eternal Flame. I will not give you an option in this, nor would you have a reason to decline this. You will join forces with Cittaglia as an official ally during the upcoming war. We will implant members of our government into Jeti’s government while fighting off invaders, until Marē decides that the death toll is too high and forces a treaty. Jeti will belong to us. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?”

I didn’t want to. Aqlli was rather rude to Ame and the rest of us. Why should we? Jeti would collapse on its own and I didn’t care about ruling it.

Ame seemed to have had the same idea as me.

“Why?”

“Ah. I knew you would ask this. The reason we want you to join is for the influence you have over the Jeti people. They seem to be terrified of you all, for good reason I might add. It’ll be easy to justify the conquest if we say it’s because you all have control over Jeti.”

Ame looked a bit nervous.

“No, I meant why should we? What do we get out of it?”

Aqlli turned to him, as if he was offended. He thought for a moment, before proposing something.

“We’ll give you leadership over Jeti. Even if it’s just in name, wouldn’t being the ruler be nice? Just look at my castle. Don’t you want something similar?”

Ame’s eyes widened.

He thought for a moment before speaking, only to get interrupted by me.

“Alright. I’ll-”

“Ame wouldn’t say yes just to that! What’s the point of a castle if we have to fight even more? I’d rather just stay like this, and I’m sure he would too. Also, it’s contradictory if you want us to be the justification and the leader after you take it over at the same time. So, what else would we get?”

Aqlli stared at me, before smiling.

“Nell Moren. The ‘Anomaly of Jeti’. You were born out of the city's disgusting heart not that long ago. Aren’t you curious about the world? Curious about the gods, maybe? Even I was curious when I heard your story. And I came up with a little theory about your birth.”

He held a book in his hand.

“They call me the ‘Historian King’, you know? If you join, I’ll teach you everything you would ever want to know.”

I was silent. If he wasn’t lying, then this was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I could get all the information that I wasn’t born with. I could even compare the two and see the overlapping truths. I needed this. I needed this more than anything else.

I tried to grab the book from his hand, but he dodged it.

“Not so fast. Promise you’ll join us, or you’ll never get to know.”

He seemed to be treating me like a child, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care how he worded it, or how he was going to manipulate me into joining him. I needed the book.

“I promise. I’ll join.”

The rest of the group stared at me, shocked.

He grinned and handed me the book titled “The Constants of Eight Gods”.

“It’s a lovely unreleased piece. I wrote it myself, and Dess can confirm that all the information is accurate.”

I ignored him, flipped open the book, and started reading it.

…

“Nothing had once existed. Nothing is impossible to fathom to those who are something. But, where does that something come from? It has to come from something, which means something has always been there. But where did THAT something come from? My research led me down this path for many years. I had uncovered many many stories, and all of them had something in common. They all had a catalyst- an arbiter even, allowing that something to appear from nothing. Eight gods to make sense of the senseless, and eight constants to uphold the absurdity within these beings.

The first god- Heaven’s Hypocritical Architect, who created the afterlife only to seal off the entrance to all who have died. Humanity is born with sin, and this cruelty is permitted by the one supposedly divine being of comfort. But, Heaven has space for people to enter. More specifically, one person. Not even I know who that person may be.

The second god - The King of Hell, who curses his greatest adversaries with immortality. The most gracious, caring god of them all. He made a deal with the eighth god to free his people of being lost. In return for the removal of their magic, he gave his people a path to stride on. No matter how lost one would be, a creature of Hell will always come and guide them. He created Hell in opposition to the architect of Heaven, allowing people refuge in life after death instead of nothingness. Hell is insanity for humans, but in the eyes of this figure of divinity, absurdity has value above nothingness. Cittaglia is the aftermath of his trade, and the proof that this generous being truly existed.

The third god- The Princess of Hell, the daughter of the King. It is common knowledge for Cittaglian philosophers that you cannot get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, which makes the proposition of needing to follow a divine authority simply for its ‘goodness’ obsolete. That is, until a catalyst is given. That catalyst is called ‘Justice’. Previously, the eighth god created ‘divinity’. However, this divinity had no use to the morals of humans. After the Princess was born, the eighth god gifted her ‘Justice’ to make that ‘divinity’ more than an unfollowable example. Justice was the second predicate needed to turn the ‘is’ of ‘divinity’ into the ‘ought’ of justice.

The fourth god- The Servant of the Mirror, the being who split humanity into two parts. First, he created male and female. Then, he created an internal self and external self. The internal self resided in one’s internal world. The Servant of the Mirror decided that humanity should not be forced to suffer with themselves, and split the connection of internal self and external self with a shard of glass. The string of ‘Identity’ was snapped, only able to be repaired by the person themself.

The fifth god- The World Cage, who has haunted me with questions since the day of her discovery. I’ve been researching and researching with theory after theory, and only came to a conclusion after meeting my daughter. The World Cage created the planet. It was unfit for human life, after the God of Space had ravaged the planet. After the eighth god placed humans on it, they were stuck inside, unable to leave. Their freedom was limited- something The World Cage hated to see. At the time, neither Heaven nor Hell had been accessible. But, even knowing that, she sacrificed herself to free the people. She turned into nothing, the one thing the gods despised the most. Humanity was broken free of their shackles, and explored the planet as they were meant to do. The disease by the name of ‘World Cage’ was also named after this god, for obvious reasons.

The sixth god- The God of Time who allowed the blood of time to flow through the beating heart of the present. They are the reason reality moves forward instead of back, and the reason the past isn’t attached to the present. Not much about it is known, besides its close connection to the eighth god.

The seventh god- The God of Space, also known as L’eau. The wife of the eighth god, and the artist of all space that fills reality. Every constant was permitted an existence by her. She created the water around L’eau, and brought the first humans to live on the island. Her death was confirmed 2,300 years ago, with her body being in a location only known to the King of L’eau. This is the only god with a completely undisputed existence, for her records are clearer than any other.

The final god- The eighth god- The Original Sin. The being who split apart from the original reality, creating something from nothing with the assistance of all other gods. He created humanity, imbuing them with sin. After this, no sin was original. Every time humanity would commit one, it was already baked into their blood. Their action was predestined by their environment and hand crafted by the sin they held in their conception. The Hypocritical Architect of Heaven can use this as an excuse for their actions, but excuses are unnecessary in the world of the divine. The Original Sin, father of humanity. The Original Sin, overseer of eternity. The spirit, despite not being known in this reality, certainly exists, since The Original Sin exists. That is how something came about. It is my only theory on him, and I alone am blessed enough to confirm it.”

…

I closed the book, eyes wide, as Aqlli looked towards me.

“And my proof is you, Nell.”

My mind was empty and full. My synthetic identity shut down while my human one raced to the point of exhaustion.

Tears dripped from my eyes as I banged on the entrance to my internal world, begging the God of Time for answers.

Why was I told that L’eau was my partner if she was the wife of The Original Sin? Why hadn’t I even heard of the first five gods? Why was L’eau labeled dead when I clearly saw her with my own eyes?

Was The Original Sin my creator? It made sense but I didn’t want to believe it.

Aqlli said I was the proof. And he was right. That meant that it was true. I had to face reality.

The Original Sin created me. This was the answer I was looking for, but it only created more questions.

Why was I created? Why was anybody created? Why does sin exist while comfort is stripped away by the beings who invented it?

And most importantly, what was my sin?

I didn’t know. But I knew that the only way to know was the throne.

I sensed the God of Time in my head. I asked if it was all true, and she nodded her head without saying anything.

They knew all of this, and never told me. And I was powerless to do anything about it. I didn’t even know what I would do about it if I had the power to act.

I wiped my tears and threw the book into Ame’s lap for him to read. I didn’t want to explain it. I was already busy stringing together what it meant.

Aqlli stood up from his chair.

“Good theory, wasn’t it? That’s all I know about the gods. Ask me anything and I’ll answer it to the best of my ability. But time is ticking. Only fools spend time waiting for the right moment instead of creating it themselves. If you want to stand a chance in the war, you need to train.”

Before I had time to process the things flying around in my brain, the door slammed open as a familiar woman walked through.

I was right. I would see her again.

Ame turned away from the book as I yelled in happiness. I wanted an excuse to stop thinking, and the perfect one was standing in front of me.

“Inda!”

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In the center of the world, Marē was conversing with his guards.

“Eternal Flame met with Aqlli? And they didn’t leave after hearing him speak?!”

The guard tried to hold in his laugh.

“Yes. They have joined forces with him. They plan to take control of Jeti.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

The guard lowered his voice.

“How long do you believe Aqlli can guard Jeti with Eternal Flame?”

Marē smiled.

“What makes you think Eternal Flame will be with Aqlli?”

The guard tilted his head as Marē spoke again.

“The first trial is going to begin soon. The hypocrite will finally wake up to guard his gates once more. When that happens, we can only pray that the prince survives.”

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