The Greatest Sin [Progression Fantasy][Kingdom Building]

The Age of Gaia was followed immediately by the Age of Monsters. Where there is no official event that marks the end of one and the beginning of another, there is a clear difference between them. Monsters did exist during the Age of Gaia, although they were not the greatest threat to humanity at the time. The latter age is already difficult to find information about, for writing did not even exist then. The Age of Gaia is borderline impossible to correctly describe with a history.

It began in an undetermined manner. It ended when the forests and trees themselves stopped being the greatest threat to humanity and Monsters stepped into that role. Of course, there is an issue that arises immediately. If humanity combined with early Divinity defeated the combined untamed Gaia, then how was it ever threatened by monsters in the first place? If the patter was reversed, the solution would be relatively simply. Nevertheless, the pattern is Gaia, the more powerful force, was the first that was defeated.

Ultimately, the era is one that is ever infuriating, because the Divines who do know of it refuse to speak to speak on it. If I had Neneria’s power, I would have long since captured them, bound their souls, and broken them into spilling their secrets.

For these are secrets that are crucial in knowing this planet. Where did the monsters come from? Arda produces creatures of spirit, even a dog can leave behind a ghost. Why are monsters excluded? Likewise, simply from the tales of the dwarves, the fact they have so much talk about “reclaiming”, rather than building, I am certain they are not the builders of the Dwarven-Highway. I am not going to suggest that the Monsters built it, of course, but I am certain that monsters on Arda still exist, and they exist in those unexplored regions of darkness. Forgotten about so long ago, that we have even forgotten the people who were there to forget about them.

- Excerpt from “Archive of Arda”, written by Goddess Elassa, of Magic.

Paida kept on walking through the nightmarish Aris catacombs. At this point, they had pushed the maps further than the maps had ever been drawn before, they had charted tunnels that didn’t exist anywhere. They had come across endless series of symbols that bore no translations, although Paida was certain that there were Divines out there who could read these…

What were they even? Runes? Letters? Words? Glyphs? Pictograms? She had no clue what they were but she was certain that she had never seem them before. Earlier, at the words were written in Rancais and other common Epan tongues. Then, as they got deeper, the language started to be older, until it was outright medieval and then archaic. And then, there had been a point where it simply shifted to something that Paida had utterly no experience with, and she couldn’t even pretend that she could work out what was going on.

The men of the Aris expedition moved through the underground as a single unit. Helenna and Malam had been correct, there were monsters down here. And that pair had also been correct when they said they knew what they were doing. Paida knew what she expected from tales about the Age of Monsters, but likewise, she knew that humanity had won out in the end.

Maybe it was because she had thought it would be as brutal as what Malam made it out to be. Maybe because the ancient Divines, those that were Pre-Heroism, much less Pre-Worldbreaking, were something of a different breed compared to Paida. Of Course Malam and Helenna would survive the Age of Monsters, they were Malam and Helenna after all.

But no.

A monster was a monster. It hid in the dark, it scurried around corners, it spoke to the mind, it made Paida forget what was happening and where she had gone, it made the men thirsty and hot, and it made the air cold. It was inhuman and it cloaked itself with veils of darkness and disguises of human skin. And it was a terror which bled.

The first monster had been a shock to them all. A man had come stumbling out the dark, bitten and hurt and somewhat charred by fire as if he had been fleeing from the succubi that they had come here to catch. The entire party had stopped, Paida had almost ran forwards, that man stumbled towards them. And then someone, without question, put a round between his eyes. And no one but Paida seemed to question the decision making: ‘I couldn’t feel the link within him.’

The link, Paida had eventually realised, was Helenna’s blessing. Every man had one, they could feel when each of them were sleeping, they got hungry collectively, they couldn’t read each other’s minds outright, but when one of them got emotional, the feeling would ripple out across everyone. And, most importantly, they knew were each of them were, at all times. And they knew when someone wasn’t part of the link either.

Monsters bled black. The team would turn a corner and find more creatures that pretended to be human, although the deeper they got, the less pretending there was. Now, even those things which tried to wear a disguise would not go the full measure. A human torso, its face disfigured and too long, attached to the black slithering body of a snake. It had slithered, and it had stopped slithering when the expedition showed it what gunfire was.

Paida had brought a blade with herself, and her large calibre pistol which served as her side-arm and she had not drawn either once yet. The human soldiers of the expedition were better at this job than her frankly. When the team would split up to quickly scour through the caves or the rooms of the catacombs, or their dead ends, and when too many souls would return, she honestly had no idea how to the monsters apart.

They made perfect copies of people, there was no pretending they weren’t. Better than the succubi, who would be too beautiful and too perfect looking, although they had not run into a single of the demons yet. Not one. Paida was starting to suspect that a wrong turn here, and another somewhere else, and they had actually been tricked.

But Paida didn’t care. By the time discoveries had started to be made, all the alarms going off in her head that she would be scolded by Helenna, then by Malam, then by Kassandora and finally by Arascus had raced off to who knew where in her mind. To some deep, abyssal reaches that she didn’t have the energy or the willpower to consider.

And so, after gunning down more than a hundred different encounters with the creatures, Paida had finally come to a stop. They had gotten to a room that was a semi-circle, some throne-room. Some chamber that looked as if it did indeed serve a purpose and Paida, for the life of her, could not work out what that purpose was. There was another door on the other side of the chamber, a raised platform in the middle, and then artwork on the walls. That artwork was grand colourings, all done in gemstones, of things that Paida struggled to place in the timeline of human history.

A huge man, a Divine definitely. Her mind immediately went to Arascus, although it could be Paramethus. Frankly, it could be any of them. From what she knew, each and every one of those ancient Gods were huge, and this one looked terribly large. Then on the next painting, the throne was being worshipped to. That definitely seemed like Arascus to her. It was simple linework, but the fact it was here blew Paida away. Under Aris? Frankly she didn’t even know if they were truly under Aris at this point or not. With how much they had travelled, it wouldn’t be a surprise if they were already underneath Aris’ countryside.

Paida walked from one end of the massive hall to the other as the rest of the expedition’s members started doing what they did best. Cameras were set up, photos taken. The Empire came, the Empire saw and the Empire recorded for all the future to see. And down here was something that was easily the greatest archaeological find in… maybe in history. Certainly in Paida’s lifetime and most definitely one she had come across herself.

The next drawing was of a tree. The tree, the throne, the Divine and the people. Paida walked around, trying to figure it out. It had to be about Arascus. That made far too much sense. Some of the humans reached for the tree, the Divine tried to stop them. And then, both the tree and the Divine lay on the ground. Both cut down by men who held axes above their heads. Paida stared at the image as she tried to recall her own history, both the lessons and the independent research she had done. She could not recall anything.

The best were the obvious ways to metaphorize the diagrams to the Age of Heroes, or to the Great War. Both would fit. A God, Arascus, had a tree, and humanity had cut him and the tree down. Paida moved on and felt her breath catch: Worldbreaking. It had to be, she was down here, staring at an ancient refuge from the time of Worldbreaking. The ground opened up, the world ruptured. Black lines shot out of the world and tore up the men with axes. “Take photos.” Paida gave the order.

“Aye aye Boss.” Came a tired reply from one of the men. That lack of respect towards Divinity was possibly the oddest effect of Helenna’s blessing, but it was true. There was simply none there. The men almost seemed to hate her. So the photos were taken and saved and they would be carried back to the surface for everyone else to inspect.

The quiet chatter interspersed by the clicking of camera shutters was stalled by one of the pointing to the entrance on the other side of the hall. “We have a guest.” It was a completely normal man, with absolutely nothing revealing about him. But even the Goddess of Rancais would not fall for it this time, there was no reason that a man dressed in odd silks should be down here. He was pale too, as if he had never seen the sun, and fine. Paida saw the looks and the collective shiver that went through the ranks of the men who had come down to the underground with her. Whoever that was, it wasn’t a human. One of the sergeants raised his rifle, aimed and pulled the trigger without a moment’s hesitation.

That fellow dropped to his knees, then fell down to his front, a hole put perfectly between his eyes. The black blood spilling from his wound was enough confirmation that the call had been correct. Paida was always impressed when they made the correct call. Even though every single time, she expected to see a stream of red, she always got the black blood of monsters being spilled.

The man, or the thing that pretended to be a man, shifted. Its arms stirred. A dozen men from all around put a hail of lead into it without a moment’s discussion or an order being said. The body did not move again, not when it had a dozen holes from which spilled black bile that smoked as it is made contact with the air. “Tough lad, that one!” One of the men called out. The rest laughed at the joke as Paida shown her torch towards the door.

More of them, peering through the doorway. They skittered away this time. Paida looked at the troops, at one of the men who was laying out wire on the ground, then she took a deep breath so that all them could hear it. There was only one thing they could do at this point, and it certainly was not to retreat. “Let’s continue and see what’s up ahead.” They were reaching the peak of what could be done with this dew men. Ammunition was starting to run out, and so was the guiding wire that was laid out so that a way back could be easily found and they wouldn’t have to scurry along the ground to find it.

They did not continue for long.

The tight tunnel, its walls entirely unadorned stone, opened up into a balcony, the balcony opened up to a view. The view revealed a ravine and the ravine was one of the most marvellous sights Paida had ever seen. A crystal cave that sparkled with light in all colours, the crystalline structures were huge and curving and unlike any sort of gemstones that Paida had ever seen. They practically flowed into each other like the waves of a beach frozen in time. Thin and wide, tall and short, the shape did not matter as long as it was elegant.

In the middle of it, a huge circular column, its edges ridged so finely as the designers had tried to cast bark into stone, or maybe traced the pathways out with running water to have such a natural texture on such an unnatural structure. It wasn’t gemstone, it couldn’t be rock. It looked like iron, and Paida had no clue what sort of material it was. Bark should not be that shade of grey. And it couldn’t be bark in the first place, how could it?

And around all of them, the largest gemstones or the smallest ones, were beasts that Paida had never seen before. She could feel the sensations in her mind, a slow, gnawing feeling as if every vein in her brain was beginning to throb and expand. A few of the beasts looked up at Paida and the team of men around her, their gazes drawn to the flashlights. Most though kept on gnawing their teeth at those gemstones. Paida did not dare raise her voice above a whisper. “We’re done here.”