Chapter 161: INTERLUDE. Heavenly Judgement
Chapter 161: INTERLUDE. Heavenly Judgement
The Heavenly Judgement was, as always, bustling with activity. Twelve people, gods or not, wouldn’t have been enough to sort through all the souls that would find themselves amid these shadowed halls and their arching pathways. The magic in this place dampened the sound of voices, preventing people away from hearing them, but even so, the whispers of the dead created a constant silken hum, as unavoidable as the rustle of waves near the ocean.
There always was a huge workload, but the system of sorting through dead souls was well-organised and only further perfected by centuries of its work. Towering figures of guards clad in polished armour led the newly appeared souls, no matter how distraught or confused they were, towards endless desks that lined the main hall.
There, clerks in ornate robes listened to the stories of the dead and marked them for Heaven or Hell. Then, no matter how the soul protested, the same guards would bring the soul to the right gate and send it through.
Gods rarely graced these halls with their personal presence. There was no need for that for a long, long time.
But today was an unusual day. One that brought a great deal of agitation to the clerks and the guards, which were bored half to death by their job until then.
It started when a clerk, unable to get more than silent opening and closing of the mouth from the soul in front of him, lifted his magic mirror to check her in a more direct way. What he saw in its depths made him frown.
“What? That can’t be, can it?” The clerk lifted his eyes to the soul, which looked blankly into the space, clenching and unclenching her fists in an automatic manner. “Hey! This says you have a mark of a druid and of an angel. It says that you are one of us—what are you doing here?”
The soul didn’t reply. The clerk shook his head, muttered a spell that contacted the head clerk of his sector, and explained him the situation.
“Angels can end up in Heavenly Judgement, but they have to die in the mortal realm here. If she was sent down there for a mission, her higher-ups would like to know if she died. If she went on her own and died… even more so,” was the head clerk’s reply. “Doesn’t talk, you say… Must be a very violent death. Alright, we seem to have no choice but to call the big shots.”
And so, the big shots were called. First the Chief Judge, then he used his authority to contact the Chief Forest Guard, Goddess of Druids’ right hand in administrating things, who told the Chief Judge that no angels under Goddess of Druids’ authority were sent to the mortal world, and then came to look at the lost soul personally.
He knew the angels who worked for him well enough to recognise the lost soul as Aivena, one of the overseers of holy groves. It was bad enough that she was sneaking into the mortal realm on her own, but to actually die there? That was alarming.
The Chief Forest Guard reported about the situation to the Goddess of Druids personally. Clearly, the mysterious death had to be investigated. It was no good if someone thought they could just kill an angel and avoid the punishment.
Goddess of Druids agreed.
The clerks of the Heavenly Judgement saw souls too traumatised by their deaths to tell their stories often enough. Normally, they would just send them to Hell instead of bothering with trying to coax anything out of them. They didn’t know how to do it.
The goddess had to deal with that problem by herself. That wasn’t easy either, but with mind-reading magic and plenty of effort, the flower of truth bloomed in Goddess of Druids’ hands.
“Devourer…” she breathed out and glared at Aivena, who still only stared blankly and kept clenching and unclenching her fists. “Stupid girl. First, you broke a rule by creating your chimeras. Second, you had Devourer in your hands and missed them because of your disgusting perversions and thinking with your womb instead of your head. We could’ve caught him by now, but it had been days. If he’s not stupid, he fled the place long ago.”
Still, this was more than they had before. Blue Mountains were a narrower area than the entire world. Goddess of Druids wasted no more time in contacting other gods and sharing the information.
But there was only one goddess who was already searching in the mortal realm, and therefore, didn’t need days of arguing with her peers to get in there.
The message from Goddess of Druids caught Goddess of Wizards in yet another temple to herself she visited in search of information. Spells hid her true looks, making her look like any other acolyte in the temple, and her trusty book was hidden in a dimensional pocket.
All that changed in a moment after Goddess of Wizards learnt what her sister in power had to say. She dropped her disguise, putting people in the temple in shock and awe at the waves of power and fury that radiated from the slim figure and the arcane book in her hands.
She didn’t explain anything to her followers. A single spell—and she was half a world away, in a small valley in the middle of the snow-covered Blue Mountains. Only a small hut, half-covered by snow, made this place stand out from a thousand of other mountain valleys.
Goddess of Wizards opened her book and began to bring streams of magic together, weaving time and space and turning past into present. Devourer wasn’t here now, but he had been. She will find him faster than any of her templars, and quieter.
Soon, gleaming blue images showed the figures moving out of the hut. Imprints of the past. Goddess of Wizard watched them with a mask of cool calm on her face, and learnt.