#for tw

Eresh had spent long epochs of her endless life currying between the palaces of the gods. They were, on the whole, gaudy and vainglorious things. Desperate heaps of honors and sacrifices, arranged so as to overawe the superstitious and simple, and feed the ego of the tyrant at their heart. Some exulted in their own brutality, with ambrosia served in the skulls of foes the mutilation of slaves the entertainment of choice. 

Others were more refined in their aesthetics. Choirs eternally singing paeans to their benevolence and glory. Monoliths minutely inscribed with all the honors and offices they had received from yet-greater tyrants. A whole language of performance and pageantry dedicated to flattering their tender ego and convincing all the world that they were fonts of blessings and arbiters of virtue. A surprising number of them even believed the praise they placed in their acolytes mouths. 

She could not, she supposed, now judge them too harshly. Hypocrisy was the tribute vice paid to virtue, and it was her privilege to be the one who would at last collect. 

The leading lights of the Celestial pantheon were gone - consumed by one apocalypse or another, or else fled to lands unknown. But their palaces remained - dangerously ruined, hidden, warded with all the curses and miracles of jealous divinity and built in strange realms no traveler from the underworld could ever reach. 

It had, for the woman known as the Worldwalker, an interesting few months' work. She trespassed upon celestial sanctums without fear or shame, She offered aid and comfort to those poor wretches still trapped serving their master’s corpse, liberating them from chains both symbolic and very, very literal. She stepped lightly and without error, as the wrath of dead gods heated the air around her until it burst into flame or lashed the ground and everything upon it with vengeful hoarfrost.  

Many were ruined beyond all repair, or else already thoroughly looted by cosmic opportunists of a different cast. Eresh did not allow herself to be discouraged - and long days sifting through cracked panoplies were in the end rewarded. 

Numen. Mana. The essence of the heavens. Light thick as sap, pooling in the innermost sanctums and holiest places of the grandest and most exalted gods. Hardly the perfect sovereignty of the now-silent sky but it would suffice. 

* * *

Those who called the Crownless Lands home dreamt deeply, and so the strange figure known as Belshara found their company quite congenial. The sky was blue and light, the air crisp and clear, and underlying it all the faintest trace of vivid unreality which eased their presence and let them walk the earth without complication.

Helpful, when their work took them from one end of the underworld to the other. They were  a weaver, a sculptor, an architect, and above them all a very, very careful geographer. They drew plans and assigned work to whole guilds of masons and artisans, whole regiments of laborers roused by a generously offered salary for work between harvests. At seven times seven specific, precise points across the Underworld, work began in the very same heartbeat. Hills leveled and marshes drained, and - on the clear and level plains so made - monuments began to rise. Beautiful things of marble and slate, terraced gardens and fountains with basins deep enough to swim through and galleries in white and gold. Magnificent temples without a god to taint them, places of glory and grace that exist for nothing more and nothing less than the happiness of those lucky mortals who could now enjoy them. 

Well, almost. At the very heart of each of those grand monuments stood a small, separately fountain - a particularly presumptuous bowl, really. Finely worked bronze, ringed with ever-glowing sigils of power. And within each of them stood a gleaming white obelisk, both marking and fixing the location of a portal in the sky above it. And from dripped light and power spun like honey, as the remains of the true grandees of Heaven were ever-so-slowly bled. 

* * *

The dream of an empty throne room in which the Fellowship debated and decided upon matters of state grew grander with every night - from large to impressive to cavernous, as its dimensions distorted so it might hold every agent or officer of the Fellowship at once. Now, every surface within it seemed possessed of some inner light. The air was heavy with power and portent, and what had before been raucous and oft-deafening chatter between debates was now little more than a susurration of whispers. 

Which died away in turn as Tammuz alighted upon his customary perch, standing proudly at the center of the rostrum and looking down at all the assembled servants of truth and virtue. 

“We have,” he said in a voice that would have carried loud and clear even in situations where the laws of reality were not conspiring in his favor “achieved a wonderful thing. From the very beginning of creation, the tyrants above have metered out scant morsels of grace and favor, demanding slavish gratitude for something which cost them nothing at all to give. Even as we now take up the duties they so flagrantly turned their back upon, we have found ourselves limited - the blessings of the divine dripping out like sand from an hourglass. Even now, things are not truly as they ought to be. But, through diligence and industry, we can take pride in this victory. The one new tool with which we can now labor, as we suffer and strive to replace what is natural with what is just.”

He gestured as he spoke, glossy feathers catching the numinous light and casting quite dramatic shadows that only enhanced his speech’s dramatic effect. 

“And now, I shall open the floor to any who would comment. As a parliament we can vote a blessing for only a handful of other groups. Who, amid the potentates and principalities we share this realm with, can best be called a Friend of the Underworld?”

Across the Underworld, wars raged - Dalnic marines and Shaitan butchered each other in the bloody fog of war, beastmen and fey knights reaved through Elder lands only to be laid low in turn by skyborn Ascendents. And looming above it all, the Sunswallower herself was all but making a game out of massacring the last of the Old Gods’ loyal slaves - incinerating them in their hundreds even as she now turned her gaze to the nomads who dared confront her. 

And - as the last truly free land in all creation became more of an armed camp with each passing day - for those with the luck to live under the Fellowship, unlife was better than it had ever been. Better, in most cases, than [i]life[/i] had ever been, either.

Certainly many of the Fellowship’s own number still nurtured grudges over the Dalnic invasion that had seen so many of their number slaughtered and control over their rightful capital lost - but it was hard to put too much passion into the grumbling, when the future had such promise. 

The Crownless Lands were a scattered collection of enclaves - each spanning dozens or hundreds of leagues, and yet devilishly difficult to place on any map detailed enough to actually help. The fogs that surround each of them were as thick as dream, no deeper than a single stride for some and extending for leagues of impenetrable, confused horror for others (especially those who come bearing weapons and ill will). Only the great roads and rivers reliably lead through without incident - precisely the crossings that can be most reliably guarded by more traditional means. 

Beyond that barrier is, it must be admitted, a kingdom worth defending - a rightly ordered and rightly governed land. One where the blessings of lesser spirits and celestial hierarchy alike have been bent to the Common Good, where the blood of Heaven’s Bull anoints the masked brows of every judge and official, one where the wastes of the underworld themselves have been coaxed into a soft and verdant garden. Every plain has been turned to orchards and farmland, every valley and glade now hosts vineyards and groves; mountains are mined and streams dredged,, it takes only a glance to see this is a land wholly remade for the benefit of its inhabitants. 

It is, in a sense, all a dream. But one dreamt in common, and with such force that even brute reality must buckle beneath its weight. The Crownless Lands are full of such things. 

There are no true cities or palaces - nothing to siege or sack, no single heart to strike at -  but the sheer profusion of villages and towns still make the Lands one of the Underworld’s most populous kingdoms (and moreso every day, as refugees arrive seeking succor from the horrors of war). Their inhabitants are peaceable and good-natured, if oddly superstitious for living under such an avowedly (and aspirationally) atheistic government - but then, they live in a land where dreams truly do provide both omens of what is to come and guidance on how to live their life, where minor divinations and folk charms are more likely to resolve a conflict than any amount of feuding.  Their existence is one where the world and just, where circumstance conspires to reward good faith and charity. Separated from the brutality of the world beyond, a placid sort of anarchy suffices to govern them in all their daily affairs. Truly intractable disputes - and truly heinous crimes - do still occur, but rarely enough that the Fellowship’s mediation can be requested anew in each case. 

The Fellowship lives apart from those they guide and govern, scattered thinly across hilltop shrines and terraced monasteries. They are not quite ascetic, but their existence is one separated from everyday concerns - one of long hours spent mediating and debating matters of state in pillared arcades and throne rooms that were long-since cast down to ruins, of looking into the mirror-still waters of augury pools and carving sigils into clay and stone alike with knives of blessed bronze, of walking the earth and acting as ambassador, mediator and judge in a single body, restoring peace and justice alike to the underworld’s fractious souls. It is a harsh calling even should nothing go awry - it is hardly surprising how the near-ruin of the Dalnic invasion left the more senior and respected among so enchanted with auguries and divinations, so concerned with contingencies and architecting sure, safe paths towards their agreed-upon future.

The courtyard was beautiful - sublime, really. Awe-inspiring. The bones of the Bull of Heaven were white marble riven through with veins of purest gold, and it was a building material the Fellowship had made full use of. A numinous grandeur seems to emanate from every block of the rostra and amphitheater, even from the tiered seating rising up in a semi-circle before it. 

The whole array was contemptuously open to the sky - though of course in the Crownless Lands, and certainly at the heart of this nexus of power, nothing so pedestrian as sleet or storm was allowed to delay the business of state. A soft, calming mist at all times hid away the firmament, cool but not cold, neither dry nor overly humid. 

Well, at almost all times. Today was different. Today, the counterfeit light that every dead soul agreed to call the sun shone brightly down, without disguise or interruption. Today the white sand where the accused would stand was whiter than snow, painfully hot to stand upon. 

Today, the audience was for the first time filled, teeming with a crowd of three very distinct parts. 

The first was the gold-masked agents and arbitrators of the Fellowship, wh thronged the event with all the interest and zeal that would be expected. The second was every foreigner who could possibly be convinced to attend, with rumors spreading almost gleefully throughout the Half-Epoch festival of some coming bit of hubris worth the journey to witness firsthand, and invitations handed out freely to absolutely anyone who showed an iota of interest (and many people who did not).  

The third part of the audience was the most confused, given that none of them were actually there. Representatives from every great power, and most minor ones, across the Underworld - every Nameclan family, every Shaitan choir - were needed, and in at least a few cases there proved insufficient volunteers. The remainder were plucked from their dreams and astrally summoned to witness the event. With very little warning, and quite a lot of disbelief - the better part of them were probably sure this was just a particularly strange dream. The fact that they were, in the main, selected less for their office or expertise than the fact that they slept openly and without dream wards or protective charms didn’t help. 

But however much they murmured and yelled at first, their ghostly forms fell as silent as anyone else when the chimes and drums sounded from seemingly every direction - though no instruments were visible, no matter where members of the crowd might look. For a heartbeat, the music echoed through the courtyard - once it faded, a bone-deep instinct told everyone in attendance that breaking the silence would be tantamount to lethal sacrilege. 

Sacrilege was, of course, the Fellowship’s forte. Speaker Tammuz rose to the first perch on the judges rostrum with a few flaps of his wings. He was not nearly as unrecognizable as Eresh, but his role seizing the secrets and usurping the crowns of two different gods had left its mark upon him. His feathers were still an undignified motley of different shades, but now the combination seemed to cohere into something elegant and regal, only enhanced by his rich, gold-trimmed mantle. The golden mask that covered his eyes and the top half of his beak was now engraved with a sigil of authority, and tinged red with the blood of the Bull of Heaven itself. 

When he spoke, it was with the usurped and assumed authority of the divine. 

“Greetings and good morrow, one and all. My thanks for your attendance, for if justice is to be done, it must be witnessed.

This ground has been consecrated with salt and blood - it is upon the sand before you that the Bull of Heaven was slain, and twice over. God can die, as we are all well aware. Their grasping tyranny can be ended, their tombs and temples overthrown so that something new can at last begin to grow in their place. And yet, this can hardly be called justice. Nothing they have taken from a thousand myriads of worshippers and slaves is returned, no recompense made for all the inflicted in their name. 

The gods have made the world, and theirs is the vision of justice writ upon the stars. It is futile to tally the lashes upon our backs, for none can ever truly be called to account for them. 

But the gods [i]do[/i] believe themselves just, for tyranny and hypocrisy are ever boon companions. In return for sacrifice, they promise blessings. They sanctify oaths, and swear to punish those who break them. They smile upon piety and virtue, in whatever twisted manner they regard it, and say they shall raise up those who exhibit them. 

They lie. 

Let it be known to all who care to hear - Theshera Stormweaver and the clique of courtiers around her are pretenders and frauds. They have claimed the mantle of Heaven, and acted as the regents of the empty Sky - and having assumed these sacred duties, they have failed in them. The ‘celestial pantheon’ is naught but cowards and empty husks, fleeing the Serpent Fuxi rather than facing her, even as it means abandoning all they have pledged to uphold. 

I declare them negligent, and undeserving of their thrones. And I shall call them to account. At the turn of the moon they shall be tried before mortal eyes - and found wanting. Their privileges shall be stripped from them, and the duty of allocating their blessings given to those less flighty and failable in it. 

And thus creation shall take one small step towards justice.

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The preparations are made, the evidence marshalled. Despite his injuries, Speaker Tammuz stands ready to preside over one of the clearest examples of hubris the Underworld has yet seen - a court of justice calling the Celestial Hierarchy to account for its own failures. Now, with Oncith’s aid in creating the intricately layered arrays of wards to prevent everyone involved from becoming the victims of history’s greatest freak lightning storm, the trial can at least begin. 

A god can hardly manifest in their full glory, but the prosecutors and bailiffs do their best. The Lady of the Legions and all her ranking subordinates are forced to manifest avatars, given the most cool and condescending respect that addressing them by their chosen ranks and titles allows, and politely interrogated without a hint of pious submission. The prosecutions go on for days without respite, without a single crack in procedure and decorum as every instance of divine hypocrisy or neglect that could be discovered is read into the record. The centerpiece being, of course, how the goddess of the imperial legions herself spent a vital season running and hiding from Fuxi while those who sacrificed and relied upon her blessings were left with nothing but empty promises in their hour of need. 

Every god is given the chance to speak in their own defence, of course. Their arguments are recorded and carefully considered, so they might be thoroughly and perfectly refuted as the judgement is given.