#dd webb

"What kind of primal fear is this?” Ruda asked, lifting her hat momentarily to scratch her head.

“In the very broad strokes, sure. It’s the details of—”

Smoke and ashes drifted on the air around them; Toby’s aura flickered as the circle walling off this patch from its home dimension passed back over him in shrinking. It did not dissipate this time, though. The golden scythes now drifted slowly around them, tumbling end over end as they orbited the Hand of Omnu. They had cut down even the bone structures, leaving only shattered and charred fragments to vanish back into Hell as the circle shrank.

“I was so passionate when I began this,” he said into the void. “So full of indignation at what the gods have done to us. I have learned…sympathy. For them, for their choices, even for the costs they have inflicted on the world in the name of protecting their power. They were hopeless rebels who rose up to oppose omnipotent beings—just as I am now. And it begins so easily. One compromise, then another, and so on, and each makes the next easier. The cost not so painful. The guilt…more distant. Already I have reached the point where it does not hurt…enough. Not enough, CT. All this, Ildrin alone, this should make me weep. Yet I see only the place it served in the larger plan. This is the sign that I should stop. I am no longer the pure-hearted idealist who began this. I no longer trust myself with the work.

All I knew, standing before the seat of divine judgment, was that at the thought of spending eternity with the fucking gods, I’d rather take my chances with the demons and the damned.

“I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE LEFT ALONE!” The power of her lungs suited the obvious strength of her frame; her bellowing set dusk trickling in streams from the damaged walls. “I WAS PROMISED A—”