Once upon a time there was a fanfic where Jax, a thief, got sacrificed to a goddess, Pomni, and was forced to be bound to her.
It was good, though never finished to my knowledge (I can't remember the name, but I ensure it's in one of my 400+ open funnybunny tabs (I'm not joking)
Well, I just got done thinking: I want to make it gayer. I want drama, intrigue, and divine shenanigans Worth of Homerian epics and Norse tales!
So, ladies, gentlemen, and that technicolored rainbow in between, allow me to introduce:
So, some basic background: Jax and Ribbit, childhood friends, siblings even, closer than blood, thicker than thieves. Which food, cause that's exactly what they are!
Ribbit is a con artist, a smooth talking criminal that will make sell your mom just to buy what's she's selling. And then tell you the greatest tale ever! All the while Jax is taking everything that belongs to you. Rinse and repeat.
When one con goes wrong, they're forced to flee in different directions, with a promise to meet up later in the next city they planned to go too.
Shame, that they both end up dead, sacrificed by cults to goddesses that actually frown on such things.
For Jax, he is sacrificed to Pomni: goddess of of the earth, it's riches, and wisdom, and luck.
For Ribbit, they're sacrificed by cult that worships Ragatha: an agricultural and nature goddess. One who counts farms, it's crops, it's animals, and the forests and plains around them as her dominion. (Especially horses!)
Now, by divine law, despite none of them wanting this, Jax and Ribbit are bound to the goddesses they were sacrificed to. Collared in ways neither of them want. Forced to be so, less their souls be forever lost!
But, there is an interesting side effect in play: this bound also a trickle of divine energy to flow into them. With time, they could become gods themselves... But this is measured in millennia. And neither of them are that patient.
Then, enter Kaufmo! A trickster god, one that both former thieves have prayed to before. And as a god not often prayed too, he remembers them. And offers to help them.
When he is able, he will whisk them away to the forgotten wastes, the lands between the mortal plain and the divine realm. Once, it was a simple, beautiful place where souls wandered until the god of the dead would guide them to the afterlife.
Now its a wasteland of insane souls, wraiths that devour those souls, and remnants of dead and forgotten gods. But it's not easy for gods to die. And pieces of them remind and can even be drained of their divine energy!
Now Jax and Ribbit must keep this a secret of course, for they breaking so many divine laws right now. Their souls would be forfeit, and the goddesses they serve would have to destroy them, or they all would suffer.
Meanwhile, Jax and Ribbit discover something horrible: the progenitor mother goddess, Queenie, lives! But she has become wraith like, consuming souls, taking back the lives she helped create.
Meanwhile Caine and Abel, the children of the progenitor gods, also live in the wastes, but have become insane!
Caine, once the joys and unpredictability of life, is now insane and seeks to cause chaos for fun! No matter who gets hurt. And yet, a part of him remembers he was supposed to bring joy and new experiences to mortals!
Meanwhile Abel, once the guardian and guide of the dead, now seeks to kill life itself, his own mother. For no other reason that doing so would also kill death, himself.
The joys of life and the sorrows of death, the change and end, the living and the rebirth. Reduced to insane caricatures of their former selves.
Even more meanwhile, both Jax and Ribbit fall for their goddesses, though in different ways.
Jax, the brat, begins to listen to his goddess, despite the fact she refuses to avenge his wrongful death. After all, they are the last to worship her now.
Meanwhile, ribbit wraps Ragatha around her finger, and finds that power can come not just from power, but from love.
All the while kaufmo schemes something. As too does the insane God of knowledge, Kinger.
