[The Divine Realm]
"What have you done?!"
"I thought you, a god of war, would be happy at the thought of a crusade." The voice was female and emotionless.
"You will send the mortal realm into chaos!" Mars protested.
He had visited Minerva in her palace after he found out she had sent an emissary down to declare a new High Saint.
There were laws even among the Great gods and one of them was that gods in the Greater Pantheon could not outrightly contradict each other in the mortal realm.
The disorder it would bring to their churches would be catastrophic.
The effect and success of their combined authority on the mortal races of Idris only showed itself when they presented a unified front.
The goddess, Minerva, had, in solidarity, removed the highest ranking figure in their churches and declared her own son as High Saint.
"You saw what I saw! There already is chaos. The thrones of the Primordials are not glowing! Some of them are even cracked!
"We cannot let our followers or the pagans know of our weakend state. We must appear strong! The Greater gods are now in command!"
It was true. After Loki's betrayal, when the rip in the sky was closed the thrones of the Primordials went dim and began to show cracks. Only Death's throne was still glowing brilliantly without any damage.
This caused all the gods to lose a significant amount of divinity and the backlash was felt among some of their strongest followers.
The Greater Pantheon did not know what had caused all of this but they had agreed to stop communication with the material realm until their own problems were in order.
They could not rule out the possibility that they were under siege. They had tried to see the events of the battle against Loki but there had been powers beyond their comprehension at play.
Anyone who tried felt those energies retaliate and attack them mentally.
For a brief while they had felt the presence of twenty Primoridials in the Divine realm but they disappeared soon after.
No orders had been left behind, none of this had ever happened before and the laws of the gods had no guidance to offer on what to do. The divine beings were, in truth, lost.
All the gods, no matter their rank, had retreated to their palaces in the Divine realm, too afraid to return to their own realms and planes in fear of an unknown enemy. Only the Lord of the Seas remained in his realm claiming isolation.
The envoys sent to ask him to return were told exactly this:
"I will not join a coalition against Him. You may not know it yet, you may not suspect it yet but I only know one being capable of making Primoridials come to heel. He has done it before. Retreating together into one place is the same as declaring that we are against Him. I am neutral. Be gone."
"I think this has to do with the godsbane." Mars stated as he processed everything going on and sighed.
"I cannot ignore that possibility but the godsbane has never kidnapped gods. He slaughtered them." Minerva replied.
Mars sighed. "I suggest you find Him and declare your intentions with this war."
Now Minerva was surprised.
"Do you not hate Him? Why would I do that? Is that not the same thing as asking for permission? What say has He in the affairs of the gods?"
"He clearly has every say!" Mars roared. "I may seem like a war-mongering fool to you and the other Greater gods but you were a strategist in the last war with Him. You were not even our chief strategist. You did not fight on the frontlines, did not see what we saw and did not lose as much as we lost.
"That war to you was merely information and planning yet we still lost. To the rest of us, it was painful and bloody. I do hate Him, more than you can understand m, more than you can imagine."
"I thought we could defeat Him while He was weak but even while a shadow of His former self, He managed to take down all but one of our leaders and the one that remains is fiercely neutral even Triton, one of our strongest deities, has followed Lord Hades in his stance. It is time to accept that an agreement must be reached with the godsbane.
"That will only work if we accept that we have no leverage, no strength to put us on equal footing or backup to save us. It is time to make peace and for that peace, we will suffer.
"But there is no shame in bowing to one's own better and mark my words, Lord Valerian is our better. Who knows? He could teach us a lot if He became our ally but only if we teach Him mercy first."
Mars did not wait for a response and disappeared leaving Minerva with a strange expression on her face.
'It seems the Ages of the Gods truly is past. A god of war calling for peace....What has happened to us? Times are changing.' She said to herself.
*****
Valerian had been walking through the forest for a while without encountering a single one of the unwanted races.
He could hear distant sounds of beasts and monsters brawling but he did not care about them.
Mindless beasts would only want to fight but if he fought, he would rather it be with a race capable of common sense and speech. Something powerful that he could talk to first.
He could not help his curiosity. It was a vampire's curiosity that saved them from boredom throughout their long, long lives.
The deeper into the forest Val went, the older the trees seemed and the thicker their canopies got.
[Enoch: A new magic system.]
Valerian understood exactly what [Enoch] meant. He was following the negative energies in the air. "I can sense it too. It reminds me of Jack's power but feels different too. It is a power related to that of death."
[Enoch: Could it be the undead that the children were talking about?]
"Are you not supposed to be the one who knows everything?" Valerian's tone was mocking and his smile was absolutely wicked.
[Enoch: I keep telling you that I am not omniscient.]
The vampire did not reply. He enjoyed his banter and conversations with [Enoch] the most.
It was a little weird for one to be friends with the voice in one's head but Valerian and [Enoch]'s friendship was one that was tried and tested, always withstanding the sands of time and voids of space.
Unlike Samael and the others, [Enoch] was not exactly one of Valerian's current personalities.
Valerian and [Enoch] were two different beings, inhabiting the same body. It should not have worked but it did.
As Valerian got further, he came across a ruin. There were pillars of marble stone and a massive doorway that look like an underground.
A large amount of negative energy was being emitted from it. Valerian smiled.
[Enoch: Do you wish to go inside it now?]
"I am in the mood to explore. Not fight." Valerian used his mana and cast a mid-level spell [Mark].
"I'll be able to return here later. Now that it is marked I will have no trouble finding this place again."
Valerian smiled and decided to find a place to meditate and increase the rate at which he was recovering his mana.