Chapter 114: Decision
Golden lights condensed into great fingers spanning the length of the sky, clasping slowly the outline of a handle grander than anything Edric had ever seen. Its tip split the clouds wide open, sending a shower of golden lights across Belgrave, motes of it merging to his armor and feeding into the inner flame, giving him sacred strength.
“Blessed Father,” he muttered as he carved a Shifter’s body with a fist, the monster exploding into a heap of flesh and blood. Parts of it spattered over his armor, but Edric moved on, beating against the horde, a man and his armor, weapon in the hand his sole company. The disciples around his back were glowing with strength. Divine strength, now coursing through their veins.
Stories told of men who braved the dark tides for years and centuries, of honorable warriors resisting the filth of the Tainted Father with no salvation in sight.
That was the first breaking. Blessed Father himself broke the world into continents, lending his believers space to breathe. To cumulate their strength and wrap their wounds for another battle. Swarms of the Tainted Father drowned in the endless depths of the oceans, and what few of them managed to cling to the continents of the humans were cleaned with dutiful precision.
His sons and daughters descended upon the land, and taught the mankind the ways to get better. Centuries and thousands of years of effort. The world broke and it got patched again. It broke a total of nine times to no avail.
At least that’s what the stories said. Edric never much believed them. When you have too many Divine Orders you get too many tales about how the world came to be. And the moment you peeked underneath them you see the various inconsistencies riddling those times.
If the Blessed Father and the other Divine Orders were all mighty and strong, then why did humanity have to rely on Resni to do the Carving? Couldn’t they have interfered with their boundless divinity and saved them like they did in so many tales? And yet they cowed, in their eternal glory, to the unknown that were the Ancients and their inconceivable existences.
Good thing the people never read too much into it. Good thing they preferred to be told about their history rather than making an effort to learn it for themselves.
That was how the Golden Church managed to keep itself alive after all these years. That and the sheer stubbornness they cultivated in times of need. Ask any man in the Broken Lands, however, then you’d get a scoff and a pat on the back. They didn’t care for the Divine Orders. They had cast away the golden veil shrouding their eyes from the truth long ago after dealing with the damned with their own means.
But they had never seen this sight before. Nobody did, which was why Edric couldn’t resist the Thrill burning in his heart. A zealous, he was not, but it was getting harder to ignore the inner flame flaring in his heart.
The Wretched Mother’s Eye in the sky watched, helpless, a tiny speck against the incoming sword. It alone bloated the sky.
Was this how the Blessed Father butchered the Eyeless in those times? A sword through the eye. Seemed simple enough. Edric would’ve done the same if he could hold a weapon of that magnitude.