Apostles of Doom

Talarius shook his head. He is a god! He is my god. I hold him to a higher standard — that’s one of the core reasons to worship a god! They are ideals, bastions of the perfect! They are not supposed to be fallible, not like mortals.

Well… Ruiden said. Talarius was certain by the mental tone of the sword that he was not going to like the rest of the sentence. You’ve now met three gods — Sekhmekt, Hephaestus and Orcus — as well as any number of avatars, including the D’Orcs. And then there is my father, who is immortal, if not a god. Do you believe any of these individuals is infallible?

Talarius chuckled mirthlessly. Hardly. They are no different than the mortals they seek to rule! They are not perfect, nor ideal. They are just older and more jaded, yet for all their age they make mistakes!

So why would you expect Tiernon, or any of the Siblings, to be any different? Ruiden asked.

Because Tiernon is my god! Talarius shouted angrily in his mind at his sword. I have put my absolute trust in him. His design brought Excrathadorus Mortis into my possession, a soul-eating blade! How many have died permanently at my hand because of this?

As I understand it, the blade was the doing of Sentir Fallon, not Tiernon, Ruiden argued. Perhaps you should be angry with him. Enough others seem to be.

“No. I need to start accepting responsibility for my own choices, my own actions,” Talarius said out loud to his sword. Fortunately, he was alone on the balcony. “Sentir Fallon may have created the blade, but I took it. Perhaps he or the blade blinded my sight, but it was my actions that damned Melissance to her fate. If we live through this, I must make atonement. I must find and rescue Melissance from the foul fiend that took her soul!”

Citadel Battlements: An Hour Before Atunset

Hilda breathed in the fresh air as she surveyed the dark host surrounding the walls of the mighty fortress. It felt like a fortress had been lifted from her shoulders. Both Beragamos and Dashgar had gone to the Isle of Doom with Orcus, as had the other attending archons. Once they were there, all of her links, her illumination streams, had been restored, rerouted through Beragamos. She could once more bask in the light of Tiernon.

She did not, however, envy Beragamos and the attending archons. They would have their proverbial hands full channeling everything through themselves. They would once more be able to hand off links to the avatars’ HALOs; however, all of those links would have to run through them, both uplinks and downlinks. They would have the assistance of their HALOs, but they themselves had to linked to the avatars in the Citadel. Their HALOs could not handle that due to the interdiction.

She assumed, or rather hoped, that Beragamos and the attending archons would be able to bring more avatars to Nysegard to share the load. However, given the bureaucracy, and the fact they couldn’t go to the Outer Planes without breaking the links to the Citadel to drag avatars down here, she expected it would take a few more hours before full power was restored to the priests, especially those of the other Siblings.