I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 455: Ruhe Tower, the Coastland Witch King, and the Ships from the New World

At the foot of the Mountain of Life's Origin, the Temple of Life in Fort Pence

Robed in dark cloth, Metel stepped into a hall whose history reached all the way back to the age of Pence, ancestor of the Ten Thousand Serpents. She knelt on the ground and raised her eyes to the divine statue, which shimmered with refracted gold beneath the sun.

The statue had been cast entirely of gold, raised by the ancient Avel in honor of the Life Sovereign, maker of the snake people.

The ancient Avel had spared nothing in the making of it, pouring very nearly the whole strength of their nation into the work. In the end, though, it had won them no protection from the divine.

Through nearly a thousand years before that, no snake people nation had ever drawn so much as a response from the Life Sovereign.

Only when they learned that the Ruhe Great Gods existed did they understand at last that the Life Sovereign, before she departed, had already left her protectors behind. All this while those great gods had silently borne up this continent and kept watch over her garden.

And so the Earth Witch had been born, and in the end it was she who carried the Ruhe Great Gods' blessing to the Executive Nation of Ten Thousand Serpents.

Slowly, the Earth Witch recited the ancient myth handed down since time immemorial, the tale of how the era had dawned.

"The Ruler of Life sounded the horn, and Ruhe Beast Island rose in the center of the sea. Life and greenery spread across the land and sky."

That was the first half of the story. Only recently had the second half been added, written into the myth and into the sacred canon of the Temple of Life alike.

"She had seven great gods uphold this vast island, sustain our world, and nurture us to grow and flourish."

"Earth, Sky, Volcano, Glacier, Night Sky, Desert, and Moonlight are their names."

"The seven gods watch over the mortal world, all spirits cry out the name of Ruhe, and so the name of the world was born."

Only after becoming the Earth Witch, only after truly coming to know some of the gods' secrets.

She discovered further truths, more terrifying still.

Those ancient deities had come out of the primordial age. Before the snake people were ever born, there had been an older era still, one ruled by a divine race that carried the bloodline of the Divine Kings.

And the divine artifacts the snake people of Ruhe Beast Island had always been unearthing had never fallen from any divine kingdom at all. They were what those older beings had left behind upon this land.

And in the eyes of those ancient beings, those deities out of the primordial age.

The Mother of Life was not the Creator.

She was merely one of the Supreme Divine Beings.

Faintly, Metel had sensed something of this long before. In the Avel's Temple of Knowledge, worship did not go to the God of Knowledge and Truth alone. The image of a crown was always enshrined there as well, one that every Avel took for the Source of Wisdom.

So too in the Miracle Temple of the Land of Sunrise, where the sovereign enshrined for worship was the Dream Sovereign, the Supreme Divine Being of Dreams.

Recently, at last, she had found her answer.

Above all, everything she had witnessed at the sealing of the Contract of the Gods, every word she had exchanged with those beings out of the primordial age, had been telling her quietly what the truth of this world was.

In the end the Earth Witch had won no direct answer, not from the Most Ancient Race and not from the ancient puppet demon spirits. Yet sometimes no answer was itself an answer. They had not denied it, at the very least.

The Mother of Life was indeed the founder of the Second Era, the maker of the snake people, the winged people, and most of the life in this world.

But she was only the maker of life.

All wisdom had its origin in another Supreme Divine Being, a Divine King out of the primordial age.

The Earth Witch Metel looked up at the statue shining in its gold, up at that towering goddess, and murmured to herself.

"Who is the Source of Wisdom?"

"Just which ones are the Supreme Divine Beings?"

"If the Life Sovereign is not the Creator..."

"Then who is the true Creator?"

Little by little, mortals crept nearer to the truth behind the myths and the ancient past. Yet however near they came, they could never truly touch the eternal beings who dwelled within those ages beyond ages, never truly lift the veil of mystery hidden behind the passage of time.

Metel did not know the answer, and perhaps she never would.

She knew this herself.

She knelt there a long, long while, and as her fervent prayer went on, the fear drained little by little out of Metel's eyes. Her tangled thoughts settled too, quieted by the stillness of the temple.

Slowly she had come to understand that it changed nothing, whoever the true Creator might be. The Life Sovereign was still the one who had created them.

Metel bowed low until she lay pressed to the ground, and prayed forgiveness for her fear and her confusion.

"Whoever the true Creator may be, You are our Supreme Divine Being."

"You are the maker of the snake people."

"You are our maker."

And the truth she had learned from the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline she now let go of as well, slowly.

If the lineage of the Supreme Divine Beings was truly one whole, then there was nothing so strange after all in the child of another Supreme Divine Being holding the power to command a Ruhe Great God.

She was only a mortal, a snake person born of the Second Era.

To stand at her own small vantage and presume to guess at the bloodlines of the Divine Kings, at the power of the Supreme Divine Beings, was laughable indeed.

"I am a believer of Life."

"Only a believer of Life."

"My faith and all that I am, I have offered up to the supreme Life Sovereign. Everything I have, I shall spend in repaying my maker."

"Every other existence, every other greatness, is no concern of mine."

At last the Earth Witch let it all go. She rose and walked out of the temple lighter than she had come in, no longer clutching at things she could never reach.

Outside the hall, a snake-woman divine servant of the temple had waited for Metel all this while. The moment Metel emerged she stepped forward and said, "Your Highness Metel. The guests from every nation have arrived, every one of them, and they are lodged now in the embassies of Fort Pence, awaiting your summons."

The weight had gone out of Metel, as though she had passed through some manner of transformation.

"See to the preparations. I will receive them in the side halls of the Ruhe Great Gods."

"It is time new witches were born into the mortal world."

Across the several side halls, one for each of the seven Ruhe Great Gods, Metel received the believers of the other great gods.

Among them came the Chief Divine Servant of the Yellow Sand Kingdom, and the chieftain of the North Wind Tribe, from where the Fire Demon Marsh met the Ice-Sealed Plateau.

With them came the Moon Sanctum, the faith organization of the Moon God out of Moonlight City, the chief of the Thunder Temple, who had hurried in from Thunder Marsh, and the leader of the Starlight Ascetic Order, which for hundreds of years had gone on searching out the secrets of the Star Night Mountain Range.

Last to arrive were members of the Cult of Ruin and Calamity, come from Green Field County in Suinhor, who preached without cease that doomsday was fated to come.

The world, they proclaimed, would be burned to ash beneath the flames of the Lava Mountain, and salvation lay nowhere but in belief in the Lava God.

All manner of people mingled in that crowd, the worthy and the unworthy alike, yet here at last were the believers of the Ruhe Great Gods from across Ruhe Beast Island, gathered every last one.

Out in the world, they might carry all manner of reputations.

Here, though, every one of them bowed to the Earth Witch in the deepest reverence and honored her as the voice of the Ruhe Great Gods.

It was her coming, after all, that had let mortals truly reach the Ruhe Great Gods.

Even the most fanatical believers of the Cult of Ruin and Calamity flung themselves down, kissed the earth in their fervor, and cried out from where they lay, "Your Highness the Witch! Good day to you!"

After the witch had put them through a round of discussion and testing, everyone gathered on the final day in the main hall of the Temple of Life for the bestowal ceremony.

Standing beneath the statue, Metel prayed with solemn devotion, then turned and said, "Seven witches are destined to be born into this world."

"The great gods bear up the world, sleeping without end beneath the earth."

"And we are the eyes of the Ruhe Great Gods, keeping watch over the mortal world in the great gods' stead."

The Earth Witch let her gaze travel over them all. Every one of them nursed some small private scheme, and she knew it, and she paid it no mind.

Under the will and power of a god, after all, no scheme could stir so much as a ripple.

"The doctrines and the faith you hold now will not accord with the will of Ruhe, because you are not apostles, and you have never once received the gods' guidance."

"But from the moment the witches are born, they will stand in the gods' place and set you upon the true path."

"They will let you truly hear the will of the gods."

"Any who dare defy the will of the gods, any who set themselves against the gods, shall suffer the harshest of divine punishments."

The witch fixed those terrible magic eyes of hers upon everyone present, and at once a force settled deep into their very blood, as though in one instant it might strip the human shape from them and leave them mindless, witless monsters.

The feeling alone set them trembling, helpless to stop themselves.

The witch drove her final words down into the depths of their hearts, where they would never dare forget them.

"The Ruhe Great Gods are among the mightiest of divine beings, and they are gods who will never, under any circumstance, suffer deceit or mockery."

The warning delivered, the Earth Witch presented them with six metal spheres, each branded with the mark of Ruhe.

No two matched in material or color, and yet every one had the look of some strange and singular eye.

The believers, come from every corner of Ruhe Beast Island, prostrated themselves and cradled those metal eyes in trembling, fervent hands.

"Your Highness the Earth Witch! We thank you. We thank you for bringing the faith and the power of the Ruhe Great Gods into the mortal world, we thank you for bringing the Life Sovereign's protection into the mortal world!"

The Earth Witch Metel replied, "I too await the birth of the new witches, and I await the day I may gather with the other six witches upon the Mountain of Life's Origin."

In the eyes of every leader of every faction that worshipped the Ruhe Great Gods, a light flickered. They wanted exactly the same thing.

Only with a witch born could their own factions truly claim the gods' recognition, could they call themselves powers with real divine backing.

Her hopes spoken, Metel went on to lay out her own arrangements and plans.

"The Life Sovereign has taken the City of Life back into the Divine Kingdom of Creation, but the faith of the snake people remains."

"There is no City of Life now, no Tower of Heaven."

"But still we wait for our maker to descend among us once more."

"With the power of the seven witches, I mean to raise a magnificent structure once more atop the Mountain of Life's Origin."

"A tower without equal in the mortal world, offered up to the Supreme Divine Being."

"The tower that once stood in the City of Life was called the Tower of Heaven. This one shall be called the Ruhe Tower."

"In the years to come, the witches may gather once each year atop the Ruhe Great Tower, to pray to the Ruhe Great Gods, to give account of everything that has passed upon this continent in that year, and to speak our devotion to the Supreme Divine Being."

Metel turned to look at the others, her voice carrying out from beneath her veil.

"The Tower of Heaven was the tower that joined the realm of the gods to the mortal world."

"And the Ruhe Great Tower is the tower that welcomes the Supreme Divine Being's descent."

"This is the will of Ruhe, this is the will of the mortal world, and we will prove it to the supreme God."

"We are of the lineage of Life, we are believers of Ruhe, we are Her creation."

"We..."

"...have never forgotten any of this."

Everyone cried out together, "Once the witches are born, they will surely come to the Sacred Mountain of Life's Origin, to raise the Ruhe Tower for the Supreme Divine Being!"

Everyone went away carrying their hopes, as though merely holding a Ruhe Imprint would be enough to cultivate a new witch.

It was not so easy a thing as that.

The Yellow Sand Kingdom, for instance, had received the Ruhe Imprint of the Desert Worm. Whether they ever selected the Sand Witch they wanted, though, would come down to whether a truly suitable candidate existed at all.

Unless, that was, they could gain the power of the Life Altar, the power of the Eye of Mutation.

---

Ku-ku~

Ku-ku~

Wings flashed, and with them came the sound of wind.

A wind lizard dragon cut across the glacier with snow and ice piled thick over its body.

Leaving Ruhe Beast Island had cost the gods no more than an instant, their will crossing ten thousand miles to arrive and depart in a single stroke. Even the apostles and the divine chosen had taken only a brief moment to quit the Ice-Sealed Plateau.

Anu was another matter. Flying clear of the Ice-Sealed Plateau alone had cost him several days.

He flew on alone through that pale expanse of sky and earth, and in all the world he had only the wind lizard dragon for company.

The cold forced him to keep the wind lizard dragon flying low and slow, and by night he even had to huddle against it, curled into a ball, hunting out whatever shelter he could find.

The cursed place was cold enough that even an ability user could scarcely endure it.

Even so, Anu could not help his gladness. He had, after all, witnessed the sealing of the Contract of the Gods with his own eyes.

"The God of Demon Spirits, she has a pyramid of her own too."

"And King Alpens, out of the legends themselves. I saw him too, with my own eyes."

"In the legends and the stories yet to come, will they speak my name too?"

Several days on, Anu still could not master his excitement.

At last the borders of the Ice-Sealed Plateau fell away behind him, and he flew on to the Ice River Fortress, built long ago by the Avel.

Here, it was said, the Avel Divine Servant Xiuborn had crushed the allied armies of the Royal Court of Ten Thousand Serpents, then struck out for Fort Pence and slain the King of Ten Thousand Serpents of that age.

Anu had only ever had these stories secondhand. Now, at last, the ancient ruins stood before his own eyes.

He brought the wind lizard dragon lower for a look at the Ice River Fortress, and to his astonishment found people already at work repairing the city inside its walls.

Among them were craftsmen, farmers, and no small number of soldiers besides.

They had come here only recently, migrants out of some distant place. This was the first wave of them.

So bitter and frozen a stretch of land, and so close to the Ice-Sealed Plateau, was no place anyone would normally choose to live. Only because the terrain was so strategically commanding had the Kingdom of Avel ever built a fortress here at all, and after that kingdom fell, long ago, no one had come back.

The sight of these people settling here stirred Anu's curiosity in earnest.

Anu asked them, "Where have you all come from?"

The sight of a lizard man frightened the snake people, but once they heard him speaking their own tongue, they answered him.

"We are Avel. We are rebuilding our nation."

Anu was astonished. "Have the Avel not all left Ruhe Beast Island already?"

The snake person told Anu, "We are the Avel who stayed behind on Ruhe Beast Island."

Anu asked again, "The Avel's nation. Is it the Wasteland Witch Kingdom?"

Anu knew of this kingdom. Many of its people were Avel, so the stories went.

It held little standing on Ruhe Beast Island, though. Most who knew of it at all knew it only through the Wasteland Witch Kingdom's witch spirit scrolls, which had earned the place its fame.

The snake person said, "Not the Wasteland Witch Kingdom. The Coastland Witch Kingdom."

"Our Witch King led us here, and we built a new nation upon the very land where the Kingdom of Avel once stood."

Anu left the Ice River Fortress and flew on toward the place where the City of Avel had once stood.

He could not say when it had happened. A place that had held nothing but a scattering of wild folk was now a city, ringed about by coastal towns and villages of every size.

Several harbors along the coast had already been rebuilt, and still more Avel kept arriving by ship out of distant places, drawn here most likely from the tribes and wastelands in the north of the Executive Nation of Ten Thousand Serpents.

By night the city burned with lamplight, and the whole of it carried the unmistakable feel of civilization.

Anu even saw a lighthouse along the shore, its fire glowing out into the dark, guiding distant ships home.

The Avel lighthouse, once destroyed, had been raised again.

"When did so many people come to live here?"

"They really have rebuilt their nation."

Curiosity thoroughly roused, Anu went into the city and sought out the very person responsible for all of it, the Witch King of the Coastland Witch Kingdom.

The wind lizard dragon settled beneath the palace walls. Anu sent word ahead, and it was not long before a witch spirit king came out to meet him.

Anu stepped forward and gave a proper knight's salute, in the fashion of the Kingdom of Suinhor.

"Honored Coastland Witch King! My name is Anu, and I beg your pardon for so abrupt a visit."

"I once met Lord Sukob and received his teaching and his guidance, and I have carried my gratitude for it ever since."

"Passing through this region, I never imagined I would find a Witch Kingdom raised again upon the old land of the Kingdom of Avel. Curiosity simply would not let me go by without a look."

The Coastland Witch King answered Anu, "You have met Lord Sukob?"

"I am one of Lord Sukob's students, and an Avel myself."

"I lived once upon the wasteland, and I brought my companions over mountain and across river to come here and raise this nation again."

"This was our ancestors' land, after all. It was ours to reclaim, ours to rebuild."

The Coastland Witch King eyed Anu with open wariness. Never before had the king laid eyes on a lizard man.

"You are not a snake person. What exactly are you...?"

The Lizard Man Anu told the king, "I am a lizard man, from the Volcano Forest beneath the Lava Mountain. A believer of the Feathered Serpent God Kurmis."

Hearing that Anu came out of the Lava Mountain, that legendary Forbidden Zone of Death, and that he was moreover a believer of some god, the Witch King at once grew more careful.

Anu then brought out some Brown Ball Vine and explained to the king how the crop was grown.

The king was delighted, having heard of this crop before.

It existed only in Suinhor, though. Even the Royal Court of Ten Thousand Serpents and the Land of Sunrise had yet to grow it on any scale, let alone see it spread out to some backwater place like this.

And the sight of the Brown Ball Vine brought something else back to the Coastland Witch King as well.

"I have heard of some mighty being called Kurmis, who by a bequest of the Life Sovereign brought into being an entirely new form of life, and a new plant besides."

"That plant would be this new crop. And you lizard people, you would be that new life, would you not?"

Anu nodded. "I had no idea that you too had heard of it, Witch King."

After that, the Coastland Witch King warmly pressed the lizard man to stay a while, and even had him shown about this city and nation still rising out of ruin.

Still, Anu stayed only two days. He recorded what he had seen and heard, then made ready to leave.

So much still waited on him, and the lizard people back in Suinhor were waiting on him too.

But on the morning he meant to leave, cries of alarm went up across the city, one after another, and crowds of snake people came rushing toward the western shore, as though something had happened there.

Anu made his way west as well. From atop the city wall he watched a fleet come on out of the distance, great ships built for ocean voyages, the lead vessel's sails shimmering with the light of some barrier spell.

The ships put in beside the abandoned dock below the lighthouse, and before long a great crowd had gathered.

The Coastland Witch King led soldiers and ability users down to the docks to parley with the newly arrived fleet.

Soon enough, everyone knew.

This was no fleet from Ruhe Beast Island. These were ships from the Avel Peninsula, from the New Continent.

Ships from the new world.

Word ran out from the docks and swept through the whole city at once.

"The Avel!"

"The Avel have come back!"

"They're the Avel of the new world!"

"The Avel who left hundreds of years ago. Today they have returned once more!"

The city broke into cheering. No one could quite believe it.

Even the Lizard Man Anu stood astonished, up on the wall, gazing out at the fleet arriving from the west, at ships that had crossed the whole of the Storm Sea to get here.

"The Avel, who left Ruhe Beast Island hundreds of years ago?"

"There really is a new world?"

"Beyond Ruhe Beast Island, there is a far vaster world still?"

Anu had heard once that the Avel had found a new world. But hearing was only hearing, after all, nothing more.

Here and now, though, he was truly seeing ships out of that new world, a fleet off another continent entirely.

He was watching the Avel, gone for hundreds of years, return once more to Ruhe Beast Island.

The Contract of the Gods had only just been sealed, and now these ships came in. Some divine guidance lay behind it, beyond any doubt.

And in that instant a deeper question came to him.

"Has the sea route opened?"

"The new world's door has opened to us."

"From now on, will everyone be free to come and go from Ruhe Beast Island, free to sail on to the new world?"

Watching it unfold, Anu found himself trembling all over, and could not stop.

In this stretch of time he had signed the Contract of the Gods, he had seen the gods of legend with his own eyes, he had glimpsed the secrets of the last era and of the gods themselves.

And through all of it he had felt dazed, as though caught inside some kind of dream.

The whole of it left him with a sense of unreality.

Those things stood too high above him, too far beyond his reach.

But here and now, in the mortal world, he was seeing with his own eyes the changes that such power could bring.

He was seeing what the Contract of the Gods and this turning of the age had brought to nations and to ordinary people alike.

The lizard man braced against the wall as a great wind came in off the sea, filling the sails of the ships below, then rushing on to break over him.

He could not help but cry out, "Look! This is an entirely new age."

"This is the Age of Gods. This is Lord Kurmis's age."

"And it is also... our age."

After that, he flew south along the coastline, all the way to the Witch Kingdom out on the wasteland.

The Lizard Man Anu came into Scroll City to rest and resupply, and there he found the witch spirits of the Wasteland Witch Kingdom's Scroll City splitting into several small bands, making ready to leave the wasteland for destinations of their own.

So he went into the Temple of Knowledge and asked these witch spirits where they meant to go.

"We have received a divine oracle. We are to travel to Suinhor and the Land of Sunrise to spread the faith." The temple had already arranged where each of them would go.

"We are bound for the Yellow Sand Kingdom and the Thunder Kingdom." These two bands numbered far fewer than the first.

"I hear Suinhor's heritage runs long and deep, and that the place holds a great wealth of books and knowledge." The witch spirit bound for Suinhor could hardly contain their anticipation.

"I mean to go and see the Land of Sunrise for myself. They say it's extraordinarily prosperous there. I want to build a temple to the God of Knowledge in that land, and take on a cohort of promising witch spirit apprentices!" The witch spirit bound for the Land of Sunrise was every bit as excited.

The missionary bands of ability users had scarcely gone before Anu saw alchemists arriving out of distant lands, leading their students into Scroll City.

These alchemists had not come from the Land of Sunrise at all. They had been traveling through the Executive Nation of Ten Thousand Serpents when a letter reached them from the Land of Sunrise, and so they had made their way to Scroll City.

They wanted to watch the witch spirits craft their scrolls, to trade knowledge with the Temple of Knowledge, and to make use of the power of the Silk-Weaving Spirit Insect besides.

Then they meant to stay on here and become alchemists of this nation.

"Plenty of alchemists have already gone to fight over places in the Executive Nation of Ten Thousand Serpents. I'd never beat them out there. Better to come to the Wasteland Witch Kingdom instead."

"And I figure the people here are bound to need alchemists too."

So the alchemist with the lamp in hand told Anu.

Anu nodded. "The Wasteland Witch Kingdom may be a little poor, but it still has real potential."

Leaving the wasteland behind, Anu flew on southward astride the wind lizard dragon.

He came to the Executive Nation of Ten Thousand Serpents, and here the stir was greater still.

Nearly every temple and shrine, great and small, had received a divine oracle, and the divine servants in them were restless enough that no urging at all was needed before they began preparing to set out.

They meant to break new ground for the faith in distant lands, to carry their gods' worship somewhere farther still.

Stay where they were, and they would remain nothing more than ordinary divine servants. Go out into distant lands, and they might carve out an entirely new seat of faith to call their own.

"The god is guiding us!" someone declared, holding the temple's sacred canon high overhead as they rallied their followers to set out together.

"The Age of Gods has come! Believers of the God of Earth, follow me now to distant lands. We will never return. Like our god's own faith, we will take root in another nation," someone vowed, kneeling with deep devotion before a divine statue.

"Witch spirits who believe in Knowledge, all who hold faith in Contract Law and the Legal Code, the time has come to prove ourselves!" Before the Contract Lawyer Academy, a great crowd of ability user apprentices gathered.

A world that had once lain still as stagnant water had begun, at last, to flow again.

---

Anu returned to the City of Fire Protection in Suinhor.

At the manor of the Lord of the Volcano, the wind lizard dragon had no sooner touched down than servants came swarming around it, and the whole estate burst into noisy life.

"Lord Anu has returned!"

"The Lord has returned!"

Anu leapt down and gave the wind lizard dragon a few affectionate pats.

The servants brought food for the wind lizard dragon with great care, then washed its body down with clean water.

Everything he had seen and felt on the road home had stirred him, and Anu could not wait. He summoned all the lizard people the moment he arrived.

The lizard people already knew what Anu had gone to do, and the moment they came into the council hall and laid eyes on him, they called out.

"Lord Anu, congratulations!" Someone rejoiced for him. Anu had stood as the god's own witness to the sealing of the Contract of the Gods, and every one of the lizard people celebrated him for it.

"Chief, did you really see the gods themselves?" someone asked, burning with curiosity.

"You can't just go asking things like that. Those are gods we're talking about." Someone standing nearby promptly punched the curious lizard man who had asked. A secret of that kind was not something to pry into so carelessly.

Anu said nothing of what he had lived through at the sealing of the Contract of the Gods. He told the others instead of everything he had seen along the road home.

"Ships from the new world have reached Ruhe Beast Island, alchemists have set foot on the wasteland, and thousands upon thousands of believers are rushing out to every corner of the land under the gods' guidance."

He walked slowly to stand before the mural of the Feathered Serpent God, and raised both hands high overhead.

"My kin, my brothers, the Age of Gods has come in full. Lord Kurmis is destined to become a god!"

Anu pointed toward the distance, his blood running hot, and declared, "I will raise temples to Lord Kurmis in Maya City and Limestone City!"

He had thought long and hard over what to call this temple. At last he had settled on a name.

"It will be called the Harvest Temple."