A few minutes after her companions left her house, Ariel left her house as well. She walked out the door to join her companions a changed, and significantly more powerful person than she had been when she awoke not many minutes ago. Though many of the changes were internal, one important one wasn't. It was very external and very physical.

A series of new marks were visible and in a prominent place: her neck. They were tiny, diamond-shaped "birthmarks". And Ariel intended to show them off to her fellow harpies, but not right now. The woman that just left the house was a woman on a mission. And not seconds after she left, I did too. After all, I had my own important role to play in the final steps of this deception for which I'd be rewarded with the successful and peaceful acquisition of an entire community.

I willed myself out of the house and towards a part of the desert not far from the village I had just raided. And thanks to the liberal usage of my teleportation abilities, I was joined by the figures who mattered within seconds of arriving.

Setting the stage for the finale of the conquest of the harpies wasn't a challenge.

The first thing I did was teleport the harpies we had captured to myself. Not the minotaurs, I didn't need them for this.

I opted to instead send one of the loyal bulls to Tristan, Aamlo was chosen for this honor since he was a dark night sworn to me, and I wanted to reward Tristan.

I sent the other two to Qu'Ren. I told her to select which of the two she liked best, and that he'd be hers. I was very specific about it.

Get to know them both Qu'Ren. They are my creations, minotaurs I directly created for a mission and that mission is now done. I don't want to just get rid of them, so I am instead giving them to critical leaders. There's actually three, but I sent the oldest of them to Tristan. One of them will work as your bodyguard, and the other will be sent to another leader. I told her, in a mental message. She was appreciative of the gift and promised to take good care of the bulls.

With the two most direct parts of the finale of our dramatic encounters set up in advance, all that was left was for me to do some research and wait for the players to arrive.

How do I want to do this? I know one way for me to do so would be for me to just swap out their memories of the whole thing, but that's not challenging, nor is it fun. I thought to myself, on the same sandy dune I had been before.

I could just create illusions of the heads of the minotaurs and make them real... I told myself but found that to be still pretty boring and definitely not challenging.

As it often happens, my third idea was the one I liked the best. What if I do what I did with Menanam and create illusionary minotaurs before bringing them to life? And just make them weak enough that the harpies fight them and win? I thought in the stillness and emptiness of the desert. That idea brought a smile to face and it felt perfect for what I hoped to do: create a challenging, and memorable fight for the harpies to practice their new powers and adjust to their new realities.

That's perfect. And it's not even hard. I thought, with a wide grin on my face. I set about it immediately, knowing that I'd have very little time to do it.

The first thing I needed was the base illusions themselves. Four magic circles flared to life underneath me and the minotaurs I had created before, as well as the minotaur disguise I had created to use myself, were rapidly formed within them.

This is... noticeably faster than before. I noticed with a surprised and pleasant expression on my face. It's perfect. And almost certainly the influence of the domain of magic. I realized, having quickly deduced that rather obvious fact.

I studied the minotaurs, carefully examining them before determining that they would be able to adequately perform their duties. I chuckled when I actually thought about what their duties entail. These things are created to die. I thought, keenly aware of that. They are things I made exclusively to give my servants something to kill. I told myself.

Almost unconsciously, I found myself grinning at that. I wasn't entirely comfortable with it, but a small part of me heard and even enjoyed the whispers of some of the domains and subdomains that I had recently gained influence over.

This is your power...

These creatures exist at all because of you. It is your right to decide when they die.

Embrace this power. Use it to power up your own servants.

You can render them immune to pain you know. Make it so they aren't suffering... And then use them for all sorts of purposes.

I ignored many of those voices, but I didn't entirely ignore one of them. One of them had an interesting suggestion. All sorts of purposes huh? That is quite interesting. Maybe I could use these things for sacrifices. To summon demons... to create undead. I asked myself, knowing that I needed to test something.

Hagitha would have a field day if what I'm thinking works... Heck, I'd have a field day if this worked... I thought, grinning about the possibility of being able to gain a shortcut to summon powerful demons and to being able to gain serious influence over the sub-domain of necromancy.

But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. This combination, just like the combinations of things I do when I create lifeforms the more formal, divine-power way, creates real life-forms with existant bodies and souls. If the point is the sacrifice and reanimation of things than this ought to work. I figured, having to suppress an increasing amount of excitement.

But this isn't the time! I realized, suddenly painfully aware that the whole reason for all of this was very quickly approaching. I gritted my teeth and began the process by which souls were created. The only trait I gave them of any real importance was that I removed their sense of pain so they wouldn't suffer needlessly.

The harpies arrived on the scene not long after the minotaurs came to life. They flew over the dune we were located in, where I was happily invisible and incorporeal and almost missed us altogether. In fact, what gave away our position was the reality of the orders I had given my simple minions.

I had specifically instructed them to roar at the harpies when the bird-women flew overhead. The thing that gave away our position, or rather their position, was, in fact, the explosive roar.

The harpies swiftly turned around and flew at my minions. I grimaced as I heard them swiftly draw closer and closer to me and the minotaurs, something they did even faster than I anticipated them doing, empowered by the mighty enhancements they had just received.

This is gonna be a mess, isn't it? I asked myself, now smiling as I imagined how much this would cause the faith of the various harpies to skyrocket. If they thought of me as a prince of power before then they'll really love me after this now that they get to experience their power explode so much that they can fight minotaurs and win.

The resulting combat began with the harpies immediately addressing the only advantage the minotaurs had in comparison to them: numbers. This was possible due to the enhanced instincts of monks, and the fact that harpies are extremely fast creatures.

Ariel took aim at the minotaur closest to her, which happened to be Danus. She focused on him, or rather his illusionary double, and hurled herself like a diamond-colored arrow straight at the bovine boy. And she did what one of the harpies, the one I turned to stone in the encounter I had with her not even an hour ago, did.

She aimed herself at her chosen target and when she was about 10 meters away from it, she flipped herself over in mid-air so that her talons were stretched out and aimed at its head.

She collided with the rock-hard beast and hit it with the force of a cannonball due to her incredible speed. The illusion-given-life was powerfully built but nowhere near strong enough to contend with the force, speed, and physique of the tiny and swift harpy empowered by the monk class's increases to her strength.

The minotaur was thrown back by the force of the collision and fell to the ground, but not with the harpy who had slammed it in the first place. The harpy's talons embedded themselves, quite painfully, in the minotaur and she was initially connected to it when it first flew back but the harpy's new strength gave her the power to force her talons deep into the thing's skull. She executed the bovine beast by using her talons to crack its skull and penetrated the brute's brain.

Ariel swiftly yanked her talons from the minotaur's skull and leaped off of the thing before it hit the ground even once. She pushed herself into the air using the force of her legs and took stock of the situation. Her attack had taken precisely three seconds.

She noted that her friends were still unconscious, and saw that one of the harpies who was taken had been turned to stone. And then she aimed at another of the three minotaurs that remained. Now the minotaurs were ready, gripping their weapons and glaring at Ariel, but since they were ready for Ariel they weren't ready for the other harpies.

The battle went about as well as could have been expected. The minotaurs didn't really have a chance to put up a fight, as the copies of myself as a minotaur and Vizin were taken out instantly by the arrival of Saffron and Jasmine. As the last minotaur, the copy of Aamlo, fell I deactivated my stone-to-flesh spell. And then I watched as the harpy I defeated with my own two hands regained her consciousness.

And at the same time, I aimed a wave of healing spells at the number of unconscious harpies that until that point had been unconscious behind the minotaurs. I watched as their eyes fluttered open at once, a smile on my face. And that is that. I told myself, aware that this was the moment of my victory.

I suppose I can do something nice for them... I thought, looking out at the harpies. I hit them with a wave of blessings, targeting each of them with a number of positive powerups, even though they'd be temporary. Their faces lit up as they felt my blessings pour over them, a clear and obvious sign of my approval. And then I sent the team a single mental message.

[Congratulations on defeating the enemy before you. Now that the immediate calamity is over, go and call for an election as soon as you get home. I have no doubt that you, Ariel, will win. When you do take a few days and then call for me. Call me to come and introduce myself to the rest of the harpies.] I told them, sending all of them the same message so they knew where I stood. I had one more task to do before I left this place.

I made a copy of Saffron's most recent memories and began to analyze it. The precise memory and notification I was looking for immediately showed itself to me since it was one of her most recent memories.

[Alert: The Minotaur named Vizin has died. You've gained experience. Congratulations!]

So it's true. That means that I do need to check to see if this counts for the necromancy subdomain and for the corruption subdomain. I thought, delighted to have confirmed that I possessed at least one truly ludicrous way to alter reality and potentially one way to shortcut some of the routes to gaining influence that were entirely oriented around repetition.

With a thought, I whisked myself away and to the side of Hagitha, the head of the Order of Whispers, my first and currently only death-cult.

An instant after I wrapped myself in my teleportation power and wished myself out of Infernius I found myself in an extravagant bedchamber. I appeared in a comfortable seat and found myself facing the bed of Hagitha, the head of a powerful noble family in the Dark Elven city of Undermoon.

The chamber I was in wasn't extravagant because of its size. It was actually smaller than Drow's bedchamber or Qu'Ren's, matching perhaps Helena's in size. It was extravagant because it was furnished with all sorts of wealthy baubles, including the same sort of diamonds that were part of the symbol that adorned the bodies of both of my witches.

I could see a small container that was filled with rubies on a nearby nightstand. That same nightstand was where a cup was placed that wasn't filled with water, but rather it was filled with the blood of a minor demon.

The bed she was sleeping on was made from the bones of the nearby lizardmen tribe. Its sheets were made from silk produced by demonic spiders. It was the single gaudiest place I had seen to date.

She had been dozing off, with her back to me, when I appeared but I immediately and abruptly startled her by appearing and then speaking within seconds of my sudden appearance in her needlessly luxurious bedchamber.

"You need to come with me. I need your help confirming something that might be and probably is a game-changer." I told her, my voice alone surprising her and snapping her out of her state of exhaustion through sheer shock. By the time I finished speaking she was glaring at me, shock causing her heart to hammer in her chest.

"Oh damn it Althos!" She said, shocked and unexpectedly annoyed by my totally unannounced appearance. I actually chuckled at her. She glared at me, her eyes filled with an uncharacteristic sense of danger.

"Trust me, given how much you love sacrifices you're gonna want to be here with me when I try this." I told her, hinting at bloodiness to come. When I mentioned the word "sacrifices" the look in her eyes changed. The anger didn't vanish, but it did dissipate a bit and I could tell that I had caught her interest. She got up and spoke.

"I take it you know where our sacrifices happen?" She asked, referring to her favorite room in her whole estate. I grinned at her, excitement no doubt visible in my gaze, and nodded. "Excellent. Let's head there now." She told me, grinning savagely at me. I excitedly teleported both of us to that grim chamber, using her memories to figure out where it was since I had never actually been in this room before.

In the span of a single heartbeat, we found ourselves even deeper underground than we had been before. We went from being surrounded by gaudy excesses to being in a large, circular chamber surrounded by the living dead.

Our teleportation was slight but the air we suddenly displaced wasn't. Our companions in this chamber immediately noticed our sudden appearance because they felt the air we pushed away from ourselves. And the ghouls turned to face us, their gray faces filled with curiosity until the moment they realized who we were. When they noticed our identities they were visibly excited and moaned in our direction, the sounds eager and obsequious.

I grinned at them, enjoying the company of the strange monsters a lot more than other living beings tended too. The rest of the chamber was odd, even without the ghouls. We were in a familial grave, a sort of mausoleum. All around us, the walls were lined with the dead ancestors Hagitha, Drow, and the other members of the Banethal family.

The giant chamber was centered around a gigantic blood-red circle etched onto the gray surface of the dirt floor at our feet. The red circle emanated hateful, negative energy that harmed living beings who lingered here for too long. This energy was why this place was loved by the ghouls who lived here and served as the new caretakers of the strange area.

The ghouls slowly shuffled in our direction, and I turned to Hagitha to explain why I had brought her here.

"So Hagitha, I owe you an explanation." I told her, a statement to which she almost violently agreed. I sighed at her, annoyed by the little ways she acted up but setting that aside for now.

"Did you know that I can create life?" I asked rhetorically, somewhat casually revealing one of my lesser-known, to dark-elves anyway, powers. She was silenced by that, as she tried to wrap her mind around the implications of it. When she fell silent I laughed, not having expected her to be silenced by what I felt wasn't a very surprising thing to reveal.

"Well, I guess in your case you do learn something new every day." I told her, chuckling through my words. She was still processing my words, trying to understand my actions.

"Wait... if you can create life, why is my cult, one of the ones you helped run in the beginning, dedicated to sacrificing people and the undead? Is it... some sort of equivalent exchange thing where you can only create life if one of your cults has sacrificed someone to you recently? A life for a life?" She asked, which was an impressive question. I still dismissed it immediately.

"No it's not. That's a... neat idea though." I admitted, committing that to memory for future cult ideas.

"No, I want to master undeath. And the subdomain of necromancy," I told her, using words that I knew she knew the meaning of thanks to my mastery of her memories. "Is a lover of repetition. It has given me a quest to gain influence over it by creating cults like yours as well as sacrificing and then raising an appropriate number of living beings as undead beings." I revealed, telling her more about the nature of my relationship with domains and subdomains than any other humanoid worshiper of mine currently knew.

Her face blanched as I told her that. It is a heck of a bomb to drop on someone. I realized, smiling at her even more shocked expression.

"I can create life in two ways. I can create illusions, make them real using immensely powerful alteration magic, and then invest them with souls that I can create, or I can do something more formal. I can create a soul first, and then a body of assorted, but not every kind of creature yet, creatures and hurl the souls into the bodies. I can even create extraplanars by roughly shaping the soul into the creature I seek to create, though that one is harder to do." I told her, making her quite possibly the only humanoid in all of existence to possess this knowledge.

"So that's how gods did it..." She said, almost wanting to sit down as she learned two methods to create life.

"I'll tell you the truth though. I didn't know something kind of ridiculous about this sort of power until today. You see, I have created life with an illusion as the base before today, but today an illusion based creature died and it granted its killer experience. That means that they are fully real creatures. I want us to see if one of these creatures can be sacrificed, raised, and counted as one of the 100 creatures I need to see sacrificed and raised. If it does... then I can gain influence over the first tier of influence over the subdomain of necromancy." I told her, excitedly.

I want this to count. I thought, surprised by just how badly I wanted to be able to gain influence over the subdomain. Hagitha considered me and then nodded at me. "Let's do this." She said, and for a second the silly little dark-elf dared to believe I'd use her to strike the killing blow.

I wasted no time quashing that hope, by contacting another dark-elf, one of the "whisperers", a member of Hagitha's cult, and explaining the situation to her. When I finished my explanation I asked her if she'd like to come and aid us, and she happily agreed. I immediately teleported her to us.

Less than five minutes later our settings had changed slightly. We were joined by one more dark-elf, one of my whisperers. She held a thin onyx dagger in her hand, holding the thing steadily, with a dark glare in her eyes.

She was facing a single creation of mine and staring it down. The thing was a simple creation, an orc who had bright yellow skin and was created the same basic way I created Menanam and the minotaurs that had been killed earlier. The whisperer was about as loud as was suggested by the name of the cult she was a member of, and she patiently waited for my command.

She had only been standing here for a few seconds, and before I gave her the order to execute the orc I had created I wanted to be sure that Hagitha had all the time she needed to be annoyed. When a few seconds more seconds passed I looked over at Raven and nodded.

She nodded back and executed the orc in front of her with an efficient stroke of her blade, sliting the thing's throat in an instant. We were all silent while the whisperer waited for the familiar notification to alert her that she had killed the orc. All it took was a few seconds before the woman's eyes flashed with the all too familiar textbox. She excitedly nodded at us, indicating that she had gotten the experience for the kill.

At this point, I looked at Hagitha and grinned. And now the final test. I realized, an excited smile on my face.

"Alright Hagitha, this is where you come in. Go ahead and raise this bad-boy." I told her, feeling a wave of excitement wash over me. She bit her lip and rose a hand in the direction of the monster.

I watched, keenly aware that this was the second time in my life that I had ever seen true necromancy be performed. A sphere of inky, hungry darkness came out of her hand and shot towards the corpse of the orc. Like before the sphere seeped into the corpse and I watched, grateful to my magical vision, as the dark energies began to vivisect and crisscross the body, touching vital organs and sending ghoulish sparks of unlife into them.

In a matter of seconds lines of unlife energy had etched themselves onto the entirety of the corpse. And then the thing began a mockery of a dance as it shook and trembled. It's really working... It's actually working. I thought, rendered nearly speechless by the sight of it, and the dark happiness that I felt at that moment.

And even before the newly animated orcish ghoul uttered its first moan, I received an alert that I had suspected I would receive if I ventured down this path, but hadn't dared hope I would receive because I didn't want to get crushed.

[Quest Update Alert:

Undead Created: 13/100]

What a day... I thought to myself before I began to laugh, the sound almost maniacal.

"Hagitha... it works." I told her, between peals of laughter. And at that she began to laugh too, delight appearing openly and boldly on her face.

We laughed together, truly and completely united for the first time. When she pieced it together, even Raven, the lowly initiate of The Order Of Whispers, began to laugh as well.