The endless hazard wasn’t endless by design. It was made specifically because one person didn’t want anyone disturbing their life with a fake version of a real god. Somehow, that made more sense than anything else I’d come up with.

I hummed in thought and crossed my arms. “Alright, so we can’t clear the hazard. Well, we could, but I don’t feel like getting trapped for eternity. Is this the end, then? Have we cleared everything we can?”

“I’d say so. Unless you want to leave the mountain and go back to fighting through the endless gauntlet.” Acasiana suggested, but didn’t give us time to humour it. “I guess I should give you some kind of reward for making it here, huh? Give me the symbiotic seed you’ve got. We’ll make it into something worthwhile.”

Jun tilted her head at me, then back at Acasiana. The quiet god stayed true to her name, but I could feel something growing within her. It was like staring at an oceanic abyss, and slowly realizing that it had grown teeth and was closing in on me. An involuntary shiver coursed through my body as the quiet god’s strange power settled on me.

Quiet shattered into a cacophony of scraping claws and gnashing teeth. A hand wrapped around my throat and crushed my armor into my tender skin, and a litany of errors and warnings appeared on my interface. I didn’t even have time to blink before all of my vitals dropped to nothing, and my armor took over my life support.

“Seb!” Jun yelled once she got over her stunned confusion. She aimed her gun at the quiet god, but a slash of a sword that hadn’t been there a second ago split my creation down the middle. And her armor behind it.

She stumbled backwards in surprise, then smashed the two halves of her gun together. Battery poured out of her core in a tidal wave of possibility, and her gun was whole once again. She glowed with possibility and power for a split second, but then the quiet god appeared before her, sword already flashing to split Jun in two.

A horrible shriek of tearing metal. A gasp of surprise and horror split out of Acasiana’s throat. Jun’s hand tore the gleaming white metal from the quiet god’s sword as her core altered the very fabric of reality around her. The quiet god teleported away. Jun turned and fired three echoing shots, followed by a horrible crack that split the world into massive spiderwebs of cracks along her bullet’s path. Then it split in two.

The quiet god’s chest exploded as she reappeared exactly where Jun had shot. She didn’t scream as her flesh spilled out to the ground and wall behind her, but a brilliant rage simmered behind a face that was no longer innocent. The god never wavered, placed her hand on her empty chest, and simply remade the flesh that Jun had destroyed.

“Moricla! What are you doing?!” Acasiana finally cried out in hurt and confusion. “These people aren’t here to take me away!”

The quiet god didn’t even turn to look at her companion of multiple millennia. She stared at her broken sword, let it fall and disappear, then crossed her fingers.

Everything broke. My arms fell useless at my sides, both of my legs gave out, and the world around me seemed to grow far smaller than I knew it was. As if the world itself had been compressed, and I couldn’t stand whatever new rules it had been placed under. Jun grunted in pain and struggled to keep herself from falling, but after a few heartbeats, she too fell to her knees with a sob of defeat.

Acasiana held out the longest. She took two steps towards the quiet god, which somehow carried her all the way across the throne hall, then summoned a suit of armor that spoke of dying suns and the extinction of all that had ever been. Deep reds. The white that was left when everything else was siphoned away. Thin, elegant lines without anything to break them up. And hovering debris that gave an effect of broken wings, orbiting around two small white and red orbs that sat just behind her shoulders.

“Stop.” Acasiana whispered. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

I couldn’t tell if that was to Jun or the quiet god. I hoped to fucking hell Acasiana was taking our side, but we hadn’t been her companions for two thousand years. It really didn’t look good for us.

The quiet god sneered. And broke the quiet with a voice so gentle and loving it should not have come from someone who just crushed my throat.

“They bear the touch of The End. I will not allow that stain to infect my world.”

Acasiana staggered back as it struck in the chest. “Your world?”

Nothing about our connection to The End. Only hurt at being excluded.

“You know that is not what I meant.” The quiet god sighed. “You are my beloved partner, Acasiana. But this world was created for me alone. You do not know what The End could do to it; we must rid ourselves of these parasites before it is too late.”

“They were just about to leave before you attacked them!” Acasiana cried in frustration. “They don’t want your world, Moricla! They just want to get stronger!”

The quiet god laughed demeaningly. “Oh, my poor dear. The only reason anyone gets stronger is for conquest. I ignored this truth for so long, and it cost this version of Sotrien everything. If I had broken my silence, maybe things would have changed. But I know I will not. The other Sotrien will fall just as mine did, and I will sit and watch until I am the last god standing.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Moricla really just let everything die? But… she’d killed Jun’s parents. That didn’t sound like standing aside to me. What changed to make that happen?

Acasiana rolled a marble down her forearm. As it left her fingertips, it tore through the quiet god’s function and gently knocked against the ground. Everything returned to normal. The quiet god stared at Acasiana with terror.

“You destroyed my power. That’s impossible.”

Acasiana stepped forward. The twin spheres from her shoulders shot off to hover over Jun and me, and within seconds, my throat was back to normal. Not healed, just… like the damage never happened in the first place. I rubbed at it in wonder, then held my breath as Acasiana and the quiet god stared each other down.

“I’ve lived with you for thousands of years. While you stagnated, I learned.” Acasiana said with a quiet fervor. “This is a hazard. The End doesn’t care about this place in the slightest. Don’t let your paranoia and delusions of grandeur turn its eye on us.”

“What do you…” The quiet god trailed off as her face fell. “I will not bring its wrath down upon us. It does not interfere with the follies of mortals or gods.”

“Then you had nothing to fear from the beginning.” Acasiana stated. She snapped her fingers in a burst of blood red, and the quiet god reappeared at her side. “Apologize to our guests. Do not bring The End down on us for absolutely no reason whatsoever.”

The quiet god looked between me and Jun, who had reappeared at my side, then let her mask of innocence retake her face. And disappeared in a burst of white. Acasiana glared at the space beside her, sighed in annoyance, and shrugged helplessly.

“Sorry about her. Hazards can’t perfectly recreate things that are too powerful, so Moricla’s brain isn't quite right.” She explained without looking for forgiveness. “Logic and reasoning are two things she doesn’t really excel at, which makes it a little hard to deal with strangers. That’s why I’m here.”

Acasiana let her armor fall, but kept the two spheres over Jun and I. “It’s probably a good idea for the two of you to get going. Moricla won’t stay away for long, but if you ever decide to come back to train, I can assure you she won’t ever leave the mountain. Who knows; maybe you’ll even manage to beat the high score.”

I tried to raise my voice to ask a question, but no sound came out. I tapped my hand to my neck in confusion, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Jun shook my shoulder, and when I turned to see why, she too had a hand on her neck.

“Ah, sorry about that. I had to cut off your voices for a little bit so Moricla couldn’t use them against you.” Acasiana apologized. She waved her hand, and the orbs above Jun and I glowed blood red as I felt my voice come back to me. “There you go. Should be all better now.”

I coughed out a wad of something darker red than blood, but it was whisked away by my armor before I could get a good look at it. “Jesus Christ, that was fucking terrifying. Why didn’t Intervention activate there?”

“Intervention? Oh, that must be one of your triggered functions. Moricla’s attacks completely ignore any defensive functions or trinkets. It’s why Juniper made the right choice by attacking her sword instead of trying to block it.” Acasiana mimed the sword swipe Moricla had done just a minute ago for emphasis. “Again, though, you don’t have much time. Give me the symbiotic seed.”

I opened my inventory with a great deal of hesitation and summoned what Acasiana wanted. It didn’t feel like the right time to give it up, but when the seed came into open air, what I felt no longer mattered. The sensation I’d gotten when I tried to corrupt it was nothing compared to the elation that came off of it in waves at the sight of Acasiana.

She grabbed the seed from my palm and held it between her fingers. A quick tilt of her head, a burst of brilliant white power, and the seed looked completely unchanged. It shivered in her hand, twisted itself into a knot of strange proportions, then burst free of its shell to reveal a mass of gleaming white liquid. It shot through with blood red lines, spun itself into a sideways 8, then solidified into a mass of power so great I could barely look at it. But I still managed to identify it.

//Mark of Acasiana

//The mark of Rainbow Basin’s founder and the first Staura to set foot on the all-world. Forgotten by most, feared by all, and forever in your debt.

//Used to access the deepest reaches of Rainbow Basin’s underbelly.

The mark split in three, then snapped out and pressed itself onto my chest. A comfortable warmth slid down my throat, then settled on my core like a thick blanket on a winter evening. I raised my eyebrows and opened my interface to see if anything had changed, and I found two symbols staring back at me. One was Nia’s teardrop, and the other was Acasiana’s red-white infinity. They faded into the background after a few short seconds, then branded themselves at the very top of my stat sheet.

“Oh, you already had an inheritance. And it looks like it was a fairly good one, at that.” Acasiana chuckled. “Well, since I’m not dead, I can’t offer you anything like that. All my mark gives you is access to all the facilities I built under Rainbow Basin that nobody’s accessed in thousands of years.”