Twilight of the Gods

At the beginning of time, there were two brothers, Anhel and Odi. History knows them as the First Lover and the Original Traitor, the twin suns that brought life to the Mortal Realm. But few remember their lonely sister, Nyx, bearer of the moon.

Indeed, the scattered groups that did worship her even called her the Forgotten Sister in their books, but those texts are long lost to libraries buried underneath collapsed civilizations. What mortals used to pray to her for, few can say. But the legend of the Lady of the Night remains alive among the necromancers who seek her counsel.

The spell books they read would have spoken of Matthius, Keeper of the Dead and her faithful servant. The pages would have told them to seek him out in the tallest mountains or the deepest seas or wherever it was he felt like being in the moment. They would have only referred to her as a great darkness they would have to confront to get what they wished after capturing him. This was how she ended up first meeting Haydn, crying over the bloody, mangled body of his soulmate Evelyn.

Nyx never liked humans. When she saw her brothers create the creatures of the Mortal Realm, she thought that their designs were clumsy. “Flawed” didn’t even begin to describe the weak flesh beings they poorly sculpted.

She didn’t understand why they kept dying. Disease, famine, blades, and magic all struck them down like flimsy paper dolls. She especially hated it when they killed each other.

“Why do you let them live?” She asked her brothers this as they fastened their suns to the smooth, blue fabric of the sky.

“They’re fun to watch,” Odi said. “They think their little lives are so important. I can never really predict what they will do.”

Anhel laughed at his response. “You can say the same about the monkeys. I let them live because it’s fascinating watching them grow. They can perceive us as infinite giant creatures. Some say they even love us, building temples and monuments in our names. I simply like looking after them.”

A sparkling warmth had come to his eyes when he described the humans. While she still didn’t understand his love for them, from then on, she began to watch the humans more carefully.

She paid attention to their little lives, realizing that they were far more intricate than her brothers hinted at. They struggled from birth till death, falling in love, dealing with loss, and supporting those around them. There were hierarchies, the haves and have-nots, peasants and royalty.

But there was one group of humans in particular that stood out to her. Amid all the chaos and violence that her brothers were so fond of, there were always the victims. In the aftermath of war, there were grieving mothers, disfigured soldiers, and lost children, each left stranded by the tangled threads of fate.

Nyx thought it was unfair that they were forced to suffer. She took it upon herself to be a protector of the defenseless, granting them a dark shield against the world’s cruelties. She would grant them shelter and a place to rebuild, letting them become whole again.

For a while, she enjoyed her role as a faceless guardian. She liked bringing joy to the short lives of these mortals and even saw herself serving them for the rest of her immortal life. But then she received a harsh reminder of why she hated humans in the first place.

She, in all of her godly wisdom, had made the mistake of saving the wrong person.

It was during another war between the Ylivian nation-states. Things had gotten particularly brutal that time around. Most wars were a fight for resources, but this one was a battle for revenge. Soldiers fought with pure hatred in their hearts instead of survival, slicing each other open with a sadistic glee she had never seen before. For once, humanity horrified her.

Amidst the chaotic bloodbath, she picked an innocent man at the edge of death to save. He barely looked human with the state of his injuries when she swooped in to defend him.

At first, she was sure that she did the right thing. He was so grateful to her that he raised the first temple in her name, filling its halls with worship. Many would hear the name “Nyx” for the first time and remember it because she was the only God that answered their prayers.

But then, the man she saved tarnished her good name. He amassed armies she didn’t need on her behalf, starting a crusade to conquer the rest of Ylivia to expand his kingdom. To his innocent followers, it seemed like he was an extremely devoted worshiper of the Temple of Nyx.

To her, it seemed like a foolish mortal man was trying to manipulate a God.

Still, he insisted that he was waging war for the greater good. He wanted to spread her influence to the entire continent and “make the world a better place.”

Of course, she didn’t believe him. But at that point, her support didn’t matter. He was already on his way to successfully conquering all of the Ylivian nation-states. Thousands would perish under the might of his armies. Even more would suffer under his oppressive reign.

In saving that man, she had created a monster.

Wracked with guilt, she retreated from the Mortal Realm, unable to find solace in the freezing cold Ylivian mountains or the blistering hot Myranian islands. Her brothers suggested that she find peace in Otherworld, the haven they created for the Gods. But, much like the Mortal Realm, she found the habitat they created to be too impractical. She didn’t understand the domes of the Glade or why the palace they constructed had to be so massive. The grandiosity of the whole thing seemed so … human.

She left their celestial home shortly after, on a quest to create a place that was perfect for her. She wandered through all the realms in the universe, seeing sights that no mortal or God would ever catch a glimpse of because neither had bothered to look. She found caves glimmering with gems and skies that changed color based on the mood of their inhabitants. But, despite how wondrous these places were, none of them felt like somewhere she would belong.

And she was still haunted by all the suffering she had caused by saving the life of that soldier.

Eventually, she made her way back to the Mortal Realm, where she found that all the temples erected in her name were torn down. A part of her was glad that no human prayed to her anymore. She didn’t think she could handle the clamor of their collective voices.

But that didn’t mean she was at peace. The dead spirits of mortals continued to haunt her, refusing to leave her side. Their ghostly presence was a nuisance and they always complained about the same thing.

“We have no home,” they lamented. “Where was the rest that we were promised?”

“Shut up,” she said. “It’s not my fault.”

They haunted her all the same regardless of what she told them. Eventually, she caved into their demands, partially because the dead were multiplying and partially because the Gods got tired too.

She created Underworld, a place where the dead could rest and for once, leave her alone. She made it dark and warm, the kind of climate that was nothing like the polarizing temperatures of the above world. And most importantly, she made it quiet.

Nyx needed the silence to think. She didn’t care that the dead were going mad from their inability to speak. There were more deceased people arriving in Underworld every second, most of them infants who could hardly walk or speak. It pained her to admit that she didn’t know what to do with them, but that was the simple truth. What was she supposed to do with all these lost spirits?

First, she sorted them into three basic groups. The sinners were placed in Hell, a damp uncomfortable dungeon where they were chained to moldy walls for the rest of eternity. The saints who had been good and kind in their lives were put into Paradise, a comfortable existence of prancing through flowery meadows and blissful satisfaction. The average person would be put through a series of trials to determine whether they deserved Hell or Paradise.

It was a work in progress.

The first person she placed in Hell was the Ylivian conqueror who tainted her name. He lived a short life, eventually making his way to Underworld after being assassinated by one of his advisors. She made sure to fasten his chains herself, tightening them with a strength she never thought she had.

“Enjoy eternity in Hell, Matthius,” she told him.

She fine-tuned the mechanics of the dungeon by punishing him, adding torture devices and other creative ways of eliciting pain. She doesn’t remember every way she made him suffer, but she knows that in the end, all traces of Matthius the Conqueror were wiped from his consciousness. He was only Matthius the Weak, the prisoner willing to do anything to earn her forgiveness.

Thus began his training as Keeper of the Dead, the steward that would take care of the menial tasks of ruling over Underworld. With his help, she expanded the realm, coming up with more sophisticated ways of judging the dead and making the operations a well-functioning machine.

The dead stopped complaining and all was well. But eventually, being the immortal being that she was, Nyx grew bored. She didn’t hate humans any less, but seeing them after death made her realize that if only those ephemeral beings had time, they would all become better people, at least the ones that didn’t go to Hell.

She started to think about the Mortal Realm again and how utterly flawed it was. At its core, it was a universe cobbled together by two feuding brothers who couldn’t make up their minds about the weather they preferred. Anhel stuck to the tropical climate of Myrania and Odi holed up in the arctic cold of Ylivia, with neither bothering to create a country that was a compromise of the two. The mortals still had incredibly short life spans that were slowly growing longer, but not long enough to make any of them less stupid. And the suffering she abhorred so much, the wars and famine, only seemed to multiply.

Nyx had enough. She decided it was time to make her own species of creatures and have them inhabit Underworld along with the dead. They would be her perfect children, created without all the flaws that plagued humanity.

That was how she came to be the Mother of Demons, doting over the unruly winged beings that brought her joy for the first time in her dreary godly life. They were beautiful beings, skin glimmering like they were sculpted from the finest metals and eyes sparkling like the midday sky. They lived long enough to learn from their mistakes, making them smart enough to limit their own suffering and build a society that far surpassed human imagination.

There was just one catch: they seemed to have a strange appetite for human flesh. Actually, appetite is a generous description. Like their mother, they hated humans, and all of those negative feelings manifested in a strong desire to make them suffer by consuming their weak, fleshy bodies. But humans didn’t taste good so the animalistic slaughter ceased quickly, replaced by a sadistic desire to inconvenience those mortals in every way possible.

Anhel and Odi were not too happy about this. They loved their humans just as Nyx loved her Demons. By then, she had disappeared long enough for them to not consider her the cause of their problems. They were fighting an enemy they knew nothing about and who only seemed vaguely familiar. They retaliated in the way they found most effective, which was through force. They violently domesticated the Demons, renaming them Angels and turning them into their obedient servants.

As one could imagine, Nyx was not happy about that. But she didn’t make her existence known to her brothers to express that frustration. She understood that her power came from remaining in the shadows. After all, it was better to strike when her opponents least expected it. She was used to biding her time and waiting for the right moment to fight back.

So while her brothers took credit for creating her wonderful beings, she spent time constructing the Boards, instruments that would orchestrate their demise. Harnessing the energy of Hell’s souls, she constructed a tool that, if used properly, could raise armies and destroy continents. Of course, it wasn’t something just anyone could wield. Boards required a strategic mind and an above-average level of ambition to achieve something. This was how she came to give it to Ezra first, a Demon who appeared to embody all the necessary traits needed to handle a Board.

He did exactly as she wanted, destroying her brothers’ control over the Mortal Realm and weakening them to the point of near-death. But he was too greedy and his ambitions had long run too far.

“So why give it to me? It’s clearly not to stop the war if you despise humanity that much.” Daeva was listening to Nyx’s story with rapt fascination up until that point.

I have so many other questions for my sister, Anhel interjected. But sure, ask that one. It’s not like she revealed that she basically caused all of my problems.

Daeva ignored his sarcasm, waiting for Nyx’s answer. Sometimes it wasn’t fun having another voice in her head, especially one she could barely control.

“Because I don’t hate all humans. Your mothers actually gave me the idea of constructing one just for you,” Nyx replied.

“My mothers?” Daeva spent most of her second life alone, with Anhel’s voice and Uriel’s company the only salve to the cruelty of her existence. It didn’t occur to her that she had a family in her past life.

“Well, Evelyn’s mothers,” she said. “They were your mother and stepmother, to be exact. They had a brilliant idea on how to fix humanity, with you at the center of their plans. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself. Those clever crafty women managed to find a way to harness the Boards to achieve time travel.”

“That’s impossible,” Daeva said reflexively. “Not even Gods can do that.”

She’s absolutely crazy. All of those years spent hiding in isolation have made her insane, Anhel said in wonder.

“I thought so too. But the concept is simple. The Board is a tool that relies on suffering to perform miraculous deeds. The tasks I gave you created the most suffering for every individual Elysian, who are the modern Gods. Godly suffering is greater fuel than human suffering so your Board can be used to time travel.”

Daeva nodded, processing Nyx’s logic. “I guess that makes sense. So you just want me to time travel, right? I just need to go back in time and correct all of humanity’s mistakes?”

“That was the original goal,” the Lady of the Night said. “But we found that you really needed to go back and fix one mistake.”

Her brows furrowed. “And what mistake would that be?”

Nyx gave her a sad smile. “The mistake of becoming Haydn’s soulmate.”

Daeva laughs, nearly falling over. “You can’t be serious. How did falling in love with one guy doom the rest of humanity?”

“That, your mothers can explain,” Nyx said. “They’ve studied the strands of fate long enough to convince me that was the turning point in humanity’s greatness. You may want to sit down for this.”