Chapter 157: God’s Of Man.

Damien felt strangely drawn to the murals on the wall just as he felt wary of the statue. There was something about the wall that immediately captured his attention, while the statue gave him an instinctive sense of unease that he couldn’t quite explain.

The wall was crude, roughly carved as if the person that made it was in a rush. The individual carvings lacked the precision he had come to associate with the ancient ruins, and yet the roughness itself seemed to carry meaning.

"There are no runes." Hannah said, realising why Andrea only summoned Damien.

Damien swept his hand across the carvings. His fingers followed the rough edges of the stone, feeling the uneven marks left behind by whoever had created the mural.

"Whoever made this didn’t need runes to convey their message... you see these indentations made at the very top, they are supposed to be stars, five of them."

Hannah and Damien exchanged a look before he continued. The five marks were crude compared to the other ancient works they had encountered, but Damien could still distinguish the pattern between them.

"If only she hadn’t been in a hurry and actually took her time carving the stone, but who am I to judge, maybe she was in mortal danger at the time."

Andrea’s expression was complicated. She seemed to be considering Damien’s conclusion while also questioning how he had arrived at it so quickly.

"How do you know it was a woman, it’s a carving on a wall, made ages ago."

Damien returned to the mural and said slowly. "The way she struck the stone, she clearly didn’t have any tools with her at the time, and perhaps used a short dagger, the sides and edges are rough and uneven, clearly done with hundreds of weak strikes that later compounded into this imperfect masterpiece."

His hand remained against the stone as he examined the marks again, paying attention to the small differences between the individual strikes. The mural wasn’t polished, and there were plenty of imperfections throughout it, but those imperfections were exactly what allowed Damien to understand how it had been made.

Damien shrugged. "Besides, I’m pretty sure only a woman could be this precise under the pressure of almost certain death."

Andrea and the others were convinced, so she asked. "What do the five stars mean?"

Damien took a deep breath and said with a straight face. "I absolutely have no idea, this is the first time I have seen any of this, I can barely understand what’s down here, with the big tree, some kind of giant sea creature, is this some lion goat hybrid, and what’s this supposed to be, a man with wings?"

He gestured toward the different figures carved into the wall as he spoke, his certainty about the way the mural had been created apparently having very little connection to his ability to actually understand what all of it represented.

"The stars are the five creation gods of this realm." Hannah suddenly said, drawing everybody’s attention.

She continued with a straight face. "I saw a similar constellation in some preserved pages back in camp, although I couldn’t seem to read the runes of that page even after I spent all this time studying them, it was like something was forcing the information out of my head."

The atmosphere suddenly felt much colder.

Andrea didn’t want to dwell any longer on the stars, she wanted to know more about the storm and blizzard deity the Divine priest kept claiming granted him power.

"What about the carvings below?".

Hannah looked at Damien and stepped aside, clearly giving him the center stage he did not ask for.

He sighed inwardly. "At first look they resemble what you would find in a child’s bed time story, creatures that inspire fear and seem almost unreal, but the person that drew this was definitely not a child, and she was doing so to warn future generations...".

Damien was still guessing, but at this point. He was convinced. "The creatures below should be gods as well... or, I guess. Corrupted gods".

The moment Damien said that he felt a strong wind blow past him, the others felt it as well, but what they didn’t feel was a raging dread accompanied by a deep sense of death and decay that swept from the half crumbled statue before them.

Damien’s body remained frozen in place long after the others composed themselves.

Andrea was the only one that felt a deep sense of death wash over her, her ability typically warns her of such things, so it wasn’t that strange, but this time it was different.

Her ability didn’t give her an escape route, all it did was make sure she understood that she was going to die, she had never felt anything like it.

"Damien". Yuri said as she shook him awake. "What happened, you spaced out for a moment there".

Andrea returned to her senses before Damien, even though he was the one Yuri was shaking, she glanced at the statue before looking back at Damien.

Damien shook his head and turned back to the murals. "My guess was correct, these are the gods of men, and the gods made by men".

Damien’s eyes remained on the carvings. He studied the way they had been placed beneath the five stars, comparing their shapes and positions with everything he had already seen on the wall.

Some of them were difficult to identify. Their bodies were exaggerated and distorted, with shapes that looked more like nightmares than anything that could have existed in the natural world. Yet there was enough structure in the carvings to make it clear that they had been deliberately drawn this way.

Hannah held back a disapproving smirk. "How can gods be made by man, I thought it was usually the other way round?".

Yuri disagreed. "Not necessarily so, gods are mostly concepts made by man in his early years, and as he grows. He learns to draw power from it, till his fate gives it life and in turn, power of its own".