Music for today: Brand X Music - Betray The Queen - Neoclassical (2021)

Mid Afternoon - Mid Summer : Year ??? : Delphi

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After ensuring our warning to Zeus and Hermes was loud enough to echo through the rest of the Pantheon, I paused to sort some idle thoughts before turning back to Hermod—expecting him to be tense after witnessing our 'greeting' to Zeus.

But it seemed to have the opposite effect.

Rather than being put on edge, he was completely lost in thought throughout the exchange, hardly saying more than a few words to ensure we understood he had no intention of getting in our way before scurrying with an unusual eagerness.

At first I found it all suspicious—and rightfully so. He was scheming. That much was certain.

But it wasn't against us.

Once he realized Dagr and I were no threat to those who didn't impede us, his attention shifted entirely to Zeus and Hermes, seeing if their arrogance would lead them to step on a landmine he already knew was active.

As I initially suspected, he was at ends with the Pantheon, and while he seemed to be rather weak comparatively, with my arrival, he seemed to believe there was a chance he could change that.

From the moment Dagr gave Zeus his correction, Hermod was hell bent on coming up with ways to take advantage of the new set of pieces on the chess board. To most, it likely would have been seen as rude—impudent. To try and manipulate the direction Dagr and I moved to be a shield or weapon for him was like throwing meat to guide a wolf that could turn around at any moment.

But... -I like him.- Compared to the endlessly arrogant beings I knew gods to be from the many other worlds we had visited under The System's eyes, he was different, holding the caution and reservation of a being who knew the limit of his strength as if he was the one to push it to the heights it reached. -He almost seems human...-

While I quickly grew curious if the other gods of the Aesir were similar though, we needed to be careful. -If this is to be our home...- "We need to watch where we step." If we were to jump into a dispute between two factions of gods without knowing the state of the world, we could destroy a careful balance we didn't intend to disrupt. -So for now...- "Let's just watch from afar."

Dagr agreed without objection—his typically aggressive tendencies suppressed by the understanding that this world couldn't be replaced like the previous ones he destroyed.

This was now our home. After setting ourselves in the hierarchy, making it clear we had no intention of intervening further for the time being, we needed to explore, learn about the world and its history, and finally.. learn to settle down a bit...

Further confrontation with the gods was eventually inevitable. Once we got an idea of how the world operated, we would have to slot ourselves in somewhere. -And the gods who have likely ruled this place for so long certainly wouldn't take kindly to it...- But for the time being, we needed to remain a neutral third party, and after our display, we expected that to be clear.

The threat of death should have been more than enough to keep them out of our fur, even if one of them was crazy enough to try and use us like wandering landmines.

However.. even after seeing Zeus nearly lose his life, watching the other gods clear out, and having heard the entire discussion, there was still one god who remained.

The goddess.

Watching us from afar, she hadn't budged in the slightest—her posture remaining tall—her expression remaining warm and curious.

Compared to the other gods, she appeared quite weak, wearing a silky white robe the same as Zeus and Hermes, and not holding her head high with arrogance, but rather intrigue. -Interesting...-

Thinking she just didn't get the message, Dagr was quick to step out in front of me with his head low and fur flared. "It seems there's still a fly left..." But despite his blatant show of aggression, the goddess never pulled her eyes off mine.

Something about her.. was off... "No..." Pausing as the humans beneath her began panicking and running away thinking Dagr was looking at them, I expected her to follow, "Leave her be."

However, that wasn't the case at all. Letting them run without her, the goddess didn't even pay them a glance, never once moving her focus from me even as they crossed the horizon behind her.

Feeling the hair on my neck raise, I spun up my divinity to dilate time and make sure nothing else was nearby before finally speaking up. "~Is there something you need?~"

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But as if waiting for that moment, she began moving—crossing the wide expanse between us slowly but carefully, before stopping beneath my snout.

"~Hey,~" Her voice was soft and gentle, bringing forth an echo of memories she had no ties to as she looked into my eyes with an overbearing interest. "~My name is Hera.~" Finally breaking eye contact, she bowed, letting her long, lush hair fall forward to expose an earring with a small, sharp canine, similar in shape to one of my own. "~Would you like me to guide you around some?~"

-What..?- It was an absurd question—to the extent Dagr nearly responded for me.

But.. something about her made my mind hitch.

Had she been anyone else—no... Had she merely asked at any other moment, spoke with a different inflection, or even broke eye contact at any other time, I would have refused without a breath.

But in that moment, I couldn't bring myself to refuse...

Something about her was different...

Even if I couldn't tell what... "~Sure.~"

Dagr froze instantly, twitching before staring at me like I had suddenly been replaced by someone else.

Even in hindsight, I never understood why I agreed in that moment. Even going back to the times before 'the crossing', I never would have agreed to such a request regardless of how interesting someone seemed, and since then, my tendency to prefer being alone had only worsened.

But in that moment, my ties to silence were somehow dulled enough to agree, even if my conscious still told me I was going to regret it. "~My name is Nott, and this is my brother, Dagr.~"

For a moment, it looked like Dagr's brain stuttered so hard it shut down, but the moment Hera turned to finally greet him, it corrected itself.

"~It's a pleasure to meet you two!~"

He never said a word though. He knew I felt it too...

...The pierce of that goddess's eyes...

"~There are many sights to see,~" ...The look of someone who knows what you will say before the words leave your mouth... "~Is there any place you wish to visit first?~"

It made Dagr's skin crawl...

But I couldn't figure out why... I couldn't find anything about her that was off... "~It looked like you came with a group of humans,~" So, trusting my senses, my mana, and my divinity telling me she wasn't a threat, I merely followed my whim. "~Could you begin by showing us the stage of sentient life in this world, and give us an introduction to its history?~"

"~Of course!~" Perhaps she had done something to me.. lulled me into a trance that dulled my instincts...

But no matter how I looked at her, I couldn't find anything else out of place...

For a time, I couldn't tell how long we walked with her. Days bled into years, and years into what felt like the steady breath of the planet itself.

Every step we took seemed to draw the world open—its clouds, its mountains, its very mana shifting to make room for us. Under Hera's voice, time lost its meaning; stories that should have taken lifetimes to unfold came and went between our heartbeats.

She spoke not like a god recounting triumphs, but like a witness reciting the slow decay of something she loved too much to abandon. Her words carried no demand—no request—never asking questions if it weren't merely to clarify, and never granting a moment of silence unless it was to let us catch our breath and sort the endless mass of information she gave us.

Had it been anyone else, I would have grown restless beneath the weight of her voice. But she was gentle—the fires that once drove her dulled and tempered by time, the same way mine had been.

Perhaps that was why.. over time.. I slowly came to resent the silence my presence brought...

The silence only she was willing to break.

Each time her voice filled it, the world around us seemed to turn. Mountains shifted in the distance; oceans rose and fell; continents faded from memory and reformed as if time itself obeyed her story. Every word she spoke painted a history so impossibly vast that even Dagr fell quiet, his suspicions blending with awe behind the stillness of his tail.

But even if I forced myself out of her trance by force, I simply fell into it from another side...

...

The world's name was Gaia at the time, granted by the gods of the Pantheon: a faction of beings that had had existed since the first rise of humanity.

Birthed from the faith of the living and forged from the souls of the dead, they had formed slowly and cumulatively over eons, learning to rule humanity as they watched over it—guiding it through its growth, its ruin, and its endless rebirth.

As it turned out, Gaia was a ridiculously ancient world. Having existed with sentient life and gods for tens of millions of years, it had cultivated civilizations not just capable of constructing global infrastructure among the most complex we had ever seen, but creating gods.

Those select few belonged to the other faction—the Aesir—a conglomeration of mortals who had clawed so high that death itself became a threshold, not an end.

But such ascension never came without a cost.

That was when Hera explained the meaning of 'generations' to us.

Across Gaia's endless history, there had been thousands—eras where humanity rose to godlike heights, only to be forcefully reset, cast back to ash, and made to climb again.

To the Pantheon, it had become a ritual—a game—to see which generation would reach furthest before their inevitable fall.

Like me, they knew there was nothing they could do to stop it. Every time humanity grew, it reached too far, and found itself staring into the jaws of the world's far more monstrous specimens.

While their civilizations were tens.. perhaps hundreds of thousands of years old.. the other species of Gaia were on a completely different scale.

*CRRRRRUMBLE*

When I first saw an example—a creature so vast it seemed to reshape the horizon itself—I could only laugh.

"~This is Typhon, the god of dragons,~" Hera spoke of it softly, her hand raising toward the living mountain whose eyes opened like twin stars, its pupils thinning like healing cracks in space. "~He is one of Gaia's guardians.. and one of the heralds of humanity's demise.~"

The air trembled with his breath, ancient and molten, washing over us like the exhale of the planet itself.

But as I looked upon that impossible being—born to end what others began—I felt the familiar weight crawl up my spine.

That pattern of creation and ruin... It wasn't foreign.

It was the same cycle Dagr and I had spread countless times.. devouring civilizations that outgrew their worlds until nothing was left but silence.

Gaia was no different.

Only this time.. we weren't the reapers.

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