A Solitary God In A Dark Multiverse - 196 Interlude

On a planet in the same galaxy but not the same solar system as Torus and Salifinos, a quiet but not tiny temple devoted to Althos stood in the heart of a fertile valley. This temple was the heart of a small community that was populated by members of a number of species, human, dwarf, elf, and even minotaurs and a few odder species as well.

Unlike many Althonian communities throughout the galaxy, this particular community had existed before Althos made himself known to its inhabitants. The temple however, unlike the rest of the community, was fairly new and its clergypeople were all youthful men and women of various species.

The sun had just risen over the mountain to the east of the mountain, and it was roughly 6:30 in the morning as its sunlight began to race across the valley and towards the temple. Within its depths lived a number of clergypeople, and those of them that awoke the earliest had just woken up.

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[Special Notification:

Congratulations on acquiring the third tier of influence over the nature domain. Normally for creatures who are only gods, as in the overwhelming majority of gods that have existed until you came into existence, one needs to reach the third tier of influence over nature before one would begin to gain lordships. Obviously, that is not the case with you, being as you are an elemental overlord as well as a god.

The purpose of this notification is to alert you to the uniqueness of your versions of the third tiers of the nature domain, and the elemental subdomains, coupled with your being a true elemental overlord. It is now fair to call you a fire, liquid, earth, air, and nature god. You have not reached the final tiers of influence over that domain and those subdomains, but you are as close to them as you can be without becoming a greater god.

Enjoy the considerable powers over nature and the elements you now possess, as well as the added reward of becoming a true elemental overlord.]

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In a darkened room that sat at the far end of the tiny temple, a single human priest was conducting the first of the daily rituals he had assigned to himself. He was on his knees right in front of his bed and his eyes were closed. He was muttering a reverential prayer that he hoped his god heard, the first of many that he would utter throughout the day.

“Lord-god Althos, please grant me the wisdom and patience needed to be a successful and pious servant of yours today. Please allow me to know your will and the skills needed to fulfill your designs. Please bless the people of Golden-Gate and guide us through your chosen servants so that we may please you.” The pious man quietly uttered.

The man’s body began to radiate an aura of potent, and harsh white light. The light spread from him and banished the darkness that perpetually invaded his room whenever night fell on the tiny community he had long lived in.

The man’s eyes relaxed as the harsh and truth-seeking light seeped out into the room and fell over the room’s sparse decorations and furniture. The light fell first over the unmade bed that sat in one corner of the room. The priest frowned at the sight but he knew that one of his master’s creations, strange entities made of metal that only attacked people out of self-defense and attended to menial tasks throughout the temple, would attend to it and the bed would be made when he retired to the room at the end of the night.

The man sighed and he turned his back on his bed, an object which even by itself dominated a desolate corner of the room. Upon turning he was able to see other furniture throughout the room. The most prominent bit of furniture in the room aside from the bed was a single vanity next to a small closet. Aside from it, other bits of furniture included a tiny table and a quaint desk.

The priest was already dressed and so he ignored the vanity and the other bits of furniture. Instead, he quietly walked towards the door that’d lead him out of his room and into the temple’s inner sanctum, a common area for the Althonian clergy.

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[True Nature Deity Details:

As a true nature deity, your powers over and ties to nature are far stronger than they’ve ever been. You also possess far more potent and precise powers over the elements now, as well as the ability to tie elements and their properties into your other powers.

The new plant subdomain is a potent subdomain that unifies and empowers all plants. With it you can grant permanent sentience and sapience to plants, have an innate empathetic connection to them, and can utilize a number of significant powers, including the ability to create plants from nothing.

To gain further influence over this subdomain, use its powers freely and regularly.

True Nature Deity Prestigious Passive Powers:

Absolute weather manipulation: You are strong enough to have total control over weather. And now for the first time you can control and create thunderstorms which are advanced phenomena that required influence over subdomains and domains. No force, even divine artifacts, can undo the weather you handcreate.

Agro-Aura: You can wreathe yourself in plants as an aura which immbolizes your enemies, uses enchanted pollen to charm neutral characters, and heal allies through restorative pollen and fruits.

Agrogenesis: You can create plants from nothing. As a result of control over the agriculture subdomain, you can now create crops from nothing. This is a wonderfully meaningful power and by using it you can do all sorts of things.

Agrokinesis: You can command and manipulate plants. This is also the power that allows you to grant plants sapience and sentience but even without doing so you can still hear them and communicate with them. This power intersects with the domains of souls and death and with it you can create souls for plants and you can command them to die.

Forest and Jungle Lordship: You gain total power over forests and jungles. This is due to your powers over nature, plants, and the earth itself. Forests and jungles become holy spots and your faithful are far stronger in them. When you step on a planet for the first time you automatically gain an awareness of forests and jungles located on or even in them.

Recognition: Druids, shamans, rangers, spirits of nature, and sapient animals and plants recognize you as a god of nature unless you wish to conceal your identity from them. This power causes them to refuse to harm you, though they may still oppose you or try to change your mind.

Water Lordship: This power is far more intense than it sounds. With it you gain lordship over oceans, lakes, rivers, ponds, and other bodies of water. This power is significant as it turns oceans, lakes, rivers, ponds, and other bodies of water into holy spots.

Werebeast lordship: All werebeasts instinctively recognize you as their lord. Even if you wish to hide the true extent of your strength from werebeasts you come across, they still recognize you as a werebeast whose strength is infinitely superior to their own. Only alphas can muster the will needed to not be servile towards you, and even among them this is only true for the very strongest alphas.

Plant subdomain active power:

Agro-transformation: You can transform a non-plant into a plant. This can be done up to one hundred times per day.

Blessing and Curse details:

Utilizing this subdomain to curse or bless someone who isn’t a plant affects how well they interact with powers. Utilizing it to bless or curse a plant empowers or weakens a plant respectively.]

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Unbeknownst to the gentle priest in service to Althos, the moment the man stepped out of his room was the same moment that Althos acquired greater power over nature than he had over anything else. And nature itself reacted to this moment of godly triumph.

In temples devoted to Althos all over the universe, even across dimensional boundaries, plants sprung to life. Flowers, trees, and crops sprung into being in and around temples all over the cosmos. The pious priest had just left his room, and stepped out into the common area that all priests and priestesses that his world’s version of the faith mandated be built into all temples as the universe reacted to the emergence of a new nature god.

Ivy sprung into being beneath the temple, becoming visible in areas where the tiled floor had cracks and holes. Massive and stunningly beautiful flowers spontaneously emerged out of the walls throughout the temple. Shrubs grew out of the ground and immediately began to bear fruits for consumption. And that was just in the common area. The sounds of the plants growing and invading the temple were audible throughout it, which awakened every single one of its inhabitants who had been sleeping, be they weary travelers from other communities or the man’s fellow clergy.

The man ignored the sounds as the sight alone astounded the priest, who began to smile excitedly at the scene in front of him. And then he began to excitedly speak to himself!

“Yes! Thank you lord-god Althos! Thank you for blessing us this way!” The man said excitedly. He worshiped his god as a deity of life, healing, arts, nature, peace, and lust and in his eyes this was a miracle that proved that the temple was especially blessed by the god they worshipped.

He excitedly walked over to the closest shrub and plucked a single blueberry from it. He flicked the thing into his mouth and his tongue explored it for a moment before he bit into it. He was unsurprised but still delighted to find that the juices that exploded out of it invigorated him and were indeed perfectly healthy to drink.

This only confirmed, in his mind anyway, that his god had personally blessed them and was indeed rewarding their service. It was at this point, perhaps two or three minutes after this happened, that other clergy began to open their doors and lay their eyes on what the pious man viewed as a reward from their divine master. Upon seeing them he began to speak yet again.

“Good morning! Come, lay your eyes on our latest blessing. Do you see how our god rewards us for keeping the faith and for sheparding those who wisely choose to follow him? He gives us these wonderful gifts and demands so little from us!” The man evangelized, speaking piously even to his fellow clergypeople. One of the priestesses, an elf young enough to be seen as young even by humans, looked at him in confusion.

“You know that everyone got this blessing right?” She asked, speaking frankly. She was unlike many of her kind due to her inelegant speech, but it was something that made her well-liked by humans and by children of all races. The priest looked at her in confusion in response to her remarks. She sleepily looked back at him, before realizing that he didn’t know that. And then she began to smile before speaking once more.

“Arthur… I looked out the window before I came out here. The fields next to the temple, and even the temple courtyard are covered in crops. Even at a glance this is comparable to the harvest of the entire town. And also, we all got individual plants growing in our rooms too.” She said, speaking in her usual frank and dry tone. Her remarks caused the pious priests’ eyes to open wide in further delight. He began to speak again, this time even more enthused than he had been before.

“That is joyous news! The entire town shall share in our delight and we shall collectively praise our magniamous lord!” The zealot said. There was a look of pious lunancy in his eyes as he spoke, one that even his fellow priests found eerie. A distinct unhingedness that was visible in the eyes of those who lived in the town’s aslyum, some of whom were also Althonians but another kind of Althonian altogether. They were darker, more violent kind zealots than Arthur was, even if his pious madness made him a bit unsettling from time to time. And their vision of the mysterious god was altogether more sinister than the envisionment of those who lived in the temple.

It was at this point that Arthur calmed down for a moment due to a strange sensation. Or rather because of a distinct lack of a sensation. The priest wasn’t hungry and all he had had to eat was the single blueberry he ate earlier. This realization took a moment to sink in, but when it did he smiled calmly at his fellow priests, and began to grab some of the blueberries from the shrub. They watched him silently, until he finished and began to approach them, blueberries in hand. At that point one of them, a pregnant human druidess who lived in the temple, looked at him and began to speak.

“Arthur? What are you doing?” She asked, curiously. He looked at her and grinned.

“Why Sister Daphne, I am giving you all breakfast.” He said engimatically. He approached her first, and she was odded out by his remarks, but still put out her hands. He dropped a single berry in them, but then paused and dropped another.

“I’ll be giving everyone but you a single berry. You’re eating for two after all.” He told her specifically. He then turned to everyone else and began to speak.

“These berries are a gift from our god! I ate one and it invigorated me. I suspect that eating even a single berry gives one enough sustenance to last for at least an entire meal. If you doubt my words, merely eat one of the berries and find out for yourself.” The haughty priest commanded.

His vice was pride. And his piety had caused him to be rewarded by his god, which in turn had caused his pride to increase. Althos had long grown used to the machinations of the proud and knew how to treat them to turn them into pious servants of his. It was rather easy to do so.

When the priest was done handing out berries, he returned to the shrub and grabbed three more. While he was doing this, his fellow priests ate their berries and felt the power of their god flowing through them, and realized that as proud as Arthur, or “Brother Arthur” as he liked to be called, was, he was indeed correct. The berries would at least last them a single meal, if not more. Arthur turned back to them and grinned.

“Someone ought to deliver these berries to Brother Dani and Sister Elva.” He told his fellow clergy. He was silent for a moment, before grabbing a few more berries. His fellow clergypeople looked at him oddly for a moment and after realizing the cause of the confusion, he spoke again.

“Just in case our high-priest and his wife are having… guests.” He explained, which caused his fellow clergypeople to uncomfortably shudder as they realized the implications of his words. He laughed, unsurprised that they were somewhat discriminatory against the special guests who sometimes visited the temple’s high priest and his wife.

After all they were only lesser clergypeople, they weren’t privy to the knowledge that he had as a high-ranking priest. They didn’t know why it was that Brother Dani and his wife were so unusual and only rarely showed their faces to the rest of the temple’s divinely blessed spiritual leaders. The priest waited a second to see if anyone volunteered to support their fellow clergypeople, and when no one did the priest sighed and set off towards the high-priest’s quarters.

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The priest’s journey was a quick one. This wasn’t an especially lavish temple and so it wasn’t particularly big. In fact many of its services were provided underneath the actual temple.

The Althonian temple offered a number of services such as midwifery, alchemy, assistance with crop management and farming, and even had services for men or women who wanted children but either lacked partners or for whatever reason had partners but couldn’t have children. Many of those services were provided to visitors underground, through a side-entrance to the temple.

It only took the priest a few minutes to reach the door that led into the quarters claimed by the high-priest. Arthur approached the door and as the man was lost in thought as he wandered closer and closer to the door he only subconsciously heard the noises that emanated from beyond it.

Loud grunts of pleasure and surprisingly deep sighs, sighs far too deep to be coming from any elven woman, were audible even though they were dulled thanks to the thick door of solid oak that stood between Arthur and his high-priest. No feminine voice could be heard through the door, despite the fact that there was a female elf in the room.

Arthur didn’t consciously hear any of the sounds coming from just beyond the door even as he knocked on it. When he knocked on the door though he did begin to hear sounds, but the sexual noises immediately ceased when the door was knocked on. Instead the sounds Arthur heard were the sounds of panicked whispers too quiet for him to accurately make out and of someone frantically putting on clothes. The man found it curious that he only heard the sounds of one person frantically putting on clothes. Perhaps a minute later, he heard the noises of someone stepping towards the door, and then finally the door opened.

A frazzled looking elf greeted him, his eyes wide and still unfocused as he opened his mouth. The elf uttered something that wasn’t quite actual words but were close enough for the human priest to make out that it was a dazed attempt at a greeting. Arthur chuckled and studied his friend.

The normally-put-together elf wasn’t at all put-together today. Instead he looked like a panicked, dazed, mess, and even though elves were naturally elegant, haughty entities, he had an air of slovenliness around him. The elf was a tall creature, standing over two meters tall, and he was dressed in regal green robes. He had messy hair and bright white eyes with no irises or other features human eyes had. His eyes were thick, milky orbs.

Arthur held up his hands, which contained some of the berries the temple had been blessed with. As he did that he also took a stealthy glance beyond the high-priest and into the room.

Brother Dani’s chambers were elegantly decorated with an assortment of nature-oriented furniture. Perhaps the most striking feature of the chambers were the two beds. One bed was a noble-looking piece of furniture, complete with silk-curtains that hid the sole inhabitant of the bed from view. The sole inhabitant was the elven high-priestess known either as “Sister Elva” or simply as “Elva”.

She sat still atop the bed, facing the human and her husband. That said the curtains made making out distinct features of hers, such as her face or the color of her outfit impossible. The only things Arthur could tell by looking at her was that she was there, that she wore the antler-headdress her particular tribe was known for wearing, and that she was visibly pregnant. Her silhouette was large enough for it to be obvious to anyone who had seen her lilthe pre-pregnancy frame.

The other bed was a far more exposed affair. In it sat a confident looking and darkly handsome human-looking entity. He was smirking at Arthur and winked suggestively at the inquisitive human. He was naked, though his manhood was hidden underneath the blankets on the top of the bed and he appeared to be chiseled from stone.

His skin was a stone-like grey color, and his eyes were an unholy shade of scarlet. To anyone less pious than Arthur the sight of a studdly devil like him in the bed of a high-priest would be alarming, but even though the lustful devil was a creature of sinister evil, Arthur saw all he needed to see emblazoned on the devil’s shoulder.

On the devil’s shoulder was a bright tattoo of a golden apple. That was the holy symbol of the particular branch of Althonian beliefs that Arthur and the others in the temple were adherents of. That symbol was sufficient to clear the odd devil of any suspicion in Arthur’s eyes. It signalled that the devil was a likeminded believer and servant of the mysterious god who protected Golden-Gate. Arthur didn’t question Althos, and thus, for now, Arthur didn’t question the devil.

Dani accepted the berries, and even as he accepted them he was able to identify what they were. He muttered something else that wasn’t quite words and moved to close the door in Arthur’s face. Arthur’s face grimanced in annoyance, but he didn’t say anything. Dani was the high-priest of the temple, and until Althos himself said otherwise Arthur would obey him.

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The elven warlock turned back towards the pleasure-devil and the devil’s eyes immediately enraptured his own. The devil immediately and thoroughly enthralled the elf, easily dominating the weak-minded elf.

“Come… Feed me.” The devil whispered, his silk-like voice effortlessly compelling the elf to submissively obey him. The elf slowly began to walk back towards the devil. As he did so, the symbol on the devil’s shoulder transformed from a golden apple to an image of a whip, the symbol that belonged to a faction of Althonians known as the “Tyrant’s Hand”, a deceptive branch comprised of actual tyrants, would-be dictators, devils, and other lawful-evil entities.

The male-pleasure devil was one of many devils who worshiped Althos as a god of dominance, tyranny, lust, pride, pain, and order. Althos himself was only vaguely aware of this specific devil, but in the past two months he had grown fond of utilizing the cult’s devilish members to humiliate prideful mortals already in his service. Dani and his wife were two such mortals, a pair of elven cultists who had turned to their god due to his powers to facilitate pregnancy and their inability to conceive on their own.

Weeks ago they had made an oath to give Althos their souls, and their second-born child, if he’d bless them with a large family. He made Dani a warlock and Elva a witch, and constructed a temple right beside the mixed-species settlement of Golden-Gate, which was where he commanded them to go and build a cult in his name. He made them into a cult of nature, arts, agriculture, and life, and filled their minds with the teachings they’d need to teach people.

The elves were actually highly charismatic, and that coupled with their actual magical powers as well as Althos’ indirect support was enough for the cult to take off. In return, Althos effortlessly made Dani fertile, and only days after the cult began to convert people Elva was pregnant with her first child.

That said, the cult was quietly inflitrated by the male-pleasure devil, Brachnos, who charmed both Elva and Dani and learned of the deal they made with Althos. Brachnos soon became a regular in their beds, and especially enjoys enthralling Dani. Althos, distantly, doesn’t particularly care about all of this. He finds the escapades of the devil amusing, as the earnestly pious servant of tyrants regularly reports to his infernal master, and sees both Elva and Dani as successful in their mission. He fully intends to collect on their debt, but is far too busy to actively command them.

For now anyway, Branchos was allowed to his fun at the expense of elves. The pleasure devil, as was typical of his kind, excelled at the usage of the pleasures of the flesh and the promises of such pleasures to ensnare mortals and to tempt into evil. They were the orderly and lawful cousins of succubi and incubi and were far more hypnotic than their chaotic, dream-wandering and shape-shifting cousins could ever be. Branchos himself was a switch, capable of being meek and submissive if attempting to enthrall a dominant person, or being dominant if faced with a submissive individual he needed to lead to evil.

The devil would surely obey Althos if the dark god ever gave him a real command, such as ordering him to lure someone specific into lawful evil acts, but for now the god hadn’t spoken to the devil. That said, the god of tyrants hadn’t spoken to many specific devils at all. And this was something that Branchos knew, as he knew some of the pain-devils who worshiped Althos as members of the Order of the Heated Blade, and who even now were in Infernius, spreading the god’s unholy words related to pain where they had been ever since they were defeated by Morehammer, months ago.

Killing a devil, even for a vestige, wasn’t a simple act. And those devils, much like their dark lord, hated the ghost-like remnant of the creator-god of the dwarves. Not just for defeating them, but for separating them from their twisted, sadistic god. In time though, the god and his pain-loving worshipers would be reunited.