Chapter 55: Mark

The hall on the other side was warm, not exactly with heat itself, but with a sort of coziness that only became stranger the farther Jaxir walked. It ran straight, long and narrow, low-ceilinged compared to the temple behind him, while soft honeyed light bled from the walls and made the mana inside him run smoother, calmer.

’Is this game trying to lull me into a false sense of security before it yeets me off another cliff?’

Jaxir wouldn’t have been surprised, but then he looked at the walls and instantly forgot the thought. Murals ran the entire length of the hall on both sides, carved into stone so fine and kept with pigment so meticulously preserved that they might have been laid down that morning.

The first panel showed four women standing together with their shoulders touching, leaning against one another while the youngest had been caught mid-laugh with her head thrown back. Four sisters, there was no mistaking it, with the same jaw, the same hair and four slight variations on the same cute little face.

Three of them Jaxir recognized immediately, though the signs weren’t as bold as they had been on the statues. Feathers marked one, another wore a simple crown, while sparkling motes surrounded the third, leaving only the fourth standing among them without anything on her head at all.

Their eldest sister, it seemed.

Jaxir walked on, and the next panel showed the four of them again, only now something had been carved above the eldest. A ladder of light, or maybe a stair, rose out of the frame toward a ring of small burning points, and Jaxir started counting them out of habit before his mind supplied the answer long before he could finish.

108 of them.

Jaxir’s brows furrowed. Why was he so sure?

Once again, he didn’t know, but the meaning came to him all the same. Those 108 stars represented the 108 Minor Gods, and the eldest sister stood at the bottom of the stair as though she was already preparing to climb toward one of those places.

Her three sisters stood below her and had been painted just slightly smaller.

’Only one of them had the talent,’ Jaxir thought. ’The other three were close, but close isn’t the same thing.’

The story seemed to etch itself into Jaxir’s thoughts as he walked, his gaze moving from one sister to the next. Their eldest was on the verge of Minor Godhood, while the other three could only watch with Demi-Godhood still uncertain before them.

Was the eldest the Minor God of Gravity?

Was he learning her backstory?

The third panel introduced the man.

Jaxir stopped walking.

It wasn’t that he was ugly, in fact the artist had made him beautiful, tall and fine-featured with his arms spread in welcome and a smile that looked kind at first glance. Whoever carved the mural had made one very deliberate choice, though, putting nothing but a dull flatness behind his eyes, two blackened spaces where a person should have been.

There was no light there, no personality.

In the fourth panel, all three younger sisters were looking at him, their attention having shifted away from their eldest sister at almost the exact same time.

All three of them.

"Oh." Jaxir’s mouth twisted as he looked between their painted faces. "Oh, that’s not going to go well."

The fifth panel showed the eldest with one hand gripping the youngest sister’s arm while her other pointed back toward the man, her mouth open as though she had been caught in the middle of an argument. Worry twisted across her features so clearly that Jaxir could read the warning despite however many centuries separated them.

"He is not what you think he is."

Jaxir could almost hear her saying those exact words.

The next panel showed all three sisters with their backs turned toward her.

It seemed it really hadn’t gone well.

That mural took up more wall than it needed to, or maybe that was the entire point, as though whoever built this place understood that this moment had been the hinge upon which everything else turned. By the seventh panel, resentment had already marred the three sisters’ frown lines and crept into their gazes.

It was a tale as old as time. They had just been told a truth they didn’t want to hear by someone who had always been just a little bit better than them, someone they had always been just a little bit jealous of.

Their eldest wasn’t warning them out of jealousy, but it was simply easier for them to decide that she was. Easier for them to believe their eldest sister carried the same secret hatred for them that they did for her.

The eighth panel was a wedding, with three brides standing beside one groom. Jaxir’s jaw tightened as he looked over the scene, the emotion behind the murals beginning to affect him more than he liked, though some part of him wondered if it had been doing that from the beginning.

The ninth mural returned to the stair of stars.

The eldest had climbed most of the way now, painted almost entirely in white and gold with her arms open and her face tilted toward the ring of burning points above. She had nearly reached the top, and one of those 108 stars had begun to open as though making room to accept her.

At the bottom of the stair stood her three sisters. They placed their hands on the stair... then they pulled.

The tenth panel had almost no color at all, only streaks of black, white and grey stretched across a long empty frame. The eldest sister fell through the middle as a tiny white figure, while above her, standing inside the place that had opened for her, was the man with nothing behind his eyes.

Jaxir stood in front of the mural for a long time.

"...So that’s how you got the job."

The Minor God of Gravity.

There were only 108 seats in all of creation for Minor Godhood, and he had taken one by convincing three sisters to betray the eldest sister who had protected them for most of their lives. Jaxir continued down the hall, but the murals that followed almost passed him by without his eyes lingering on them.

The three younger sisters eventually reached Demi-Godhood, three panels showing three crowns and three villages laid out beneath them in feathers, glimmer and starlight. They reached a stage they might never have reached otherwise, yet every image still placed their husband somewhere behind them, and Jaxir had the uncomfortable feeling they had spent a very long time convincing themselves that whatever he gave them had been worth what they had done.

More interesting than that was the empty space.

Every one of those murals left a strange gap at the edge of the composition where somebody had once belonged, and someone had gone to great effort to paint her over.

’Oh Goddess of the Light, when will your brightness return to us...?’

The echo of words he couldn’t remember have ever heard before surfaced in Jaxir’s mind and made him slowly exhale.

The hall ended in a small circular chamber, and in the center of it, atop a low stone foundation, a woman knelt with her head bowed. She wore no crown, while her hands rested open against her thighs with her palms facing upward, a posture that wasn’t quite prayer and felt much closer to quiet defeat.

Water ran from her eyes in two thin, unbroken streams, trailing down her cheeks and falling from her jaw into the basin beneath her. That basin fed the fountain surrounding the foundation, and from the smooth stone worn around its edges, Jaxir had the feeling those tears had been falling for a very, very long time.

Jaxir stood at the edge of the fountain with his ribs aching and his HP still blinking in warning, but for once he didn’t have anything smart to say.

Then the light came.

―

[Will you take on the Fractured Divinity of the Goddess of Light?]

[Be warned that doing so will mean taking on all of her burdens, whether good or bad.]

[Yes] [No]

―

Jaxir read it twice.

A more careful man would have asked what "burdens" meant, and a much more careful man probably would have considered that nothing described as a Fractured Divinity had ever sounded like a particularly good bargain.

An even smarter man might have remembered a lawyer sitting on his couch and listing conditions at the behest of an uncle who didn’t have the balls to sit across from Jaxir himself, one of which had most definitely involved staying away from Divinities and temples.

Jaxir barely thought about any of that.

What he did think about was the man with nothing behind his eyes standing on a stair he hadn’t climbed, enjoying a place he hadn’t earned. It mapped onto his own life all too well.

"Yeah..." Jaxir looked up at the kneeling statue. "I can’t stand that guy."

That was the beginning and end of his thought process. And that was enough for him to pick whatever path pissed the Minor God of Gravity off the most.

[Yes]

The fountain went still, and something poured into Jaxir that had nothing to do with mana as he understood it. His Twinkle Mana lurched inside his chest as copper and gold began to run pale from the center outward, the twinkling grain of it stretching into something longer, straighter and infinitely older.

―

[Your mana is evolvin―]

―

The notification vanished before Jaxir could finish reading it.

―

[Quest "Resolving a God’s Hatred" has been cleared]

[You have joined another Divinity. The Goddess of Light has taken your Mark of Ire upon Herself]

[Your Epic Mark of Ire has been erased]

―

Jaxir’s eyebrows rose as the last line faded, and he looked down at himself as though the missing Mark might have left some visible hole behind.

"...Huh. Thanks."

He was actually smiling when the next notification arrived.

―

[The Minor God of Gravity has recognized the Divinity you carry]

[You have stoked the rage of the Minor God of Gravity]

[You have been barred entry from every city, town, and settlement under the dominion of the Minor God of Gravity]

―

Jaxir’s smile stopped moving.

―

[Territories affected include, but are not limited to: Twinkle Village. Sparkle Village. Glimmer Village.]

―

The fountain dripped once into the basin.

"...Ah. Well, shit."