Chapter 143 Come Forth, Trivia

Chapter 143 Come Forth, Trivia

The wind died first.

Not faded — died, mid-breath, as though something had reached out and pinched the world's throat shut.

Every leaf on the mountain path stilled at once. The birds that had been singing since first light went silent between one note and the next.

Mother Keziah felt it before she understood it, and her heart dropped straight through her chest.

She looked up. The sun still hung in the sky, but wrong, too close, swollen, staring down at them like an eye that had forgotten how to blink.

"Gods above." The words left her before she could stop them.

Beside her, Zuri was already moving, descending the mountain path faster than a man his size had any right to move. "The Primordial Darkness has taken root too deep. Sealing daybreak might already be beyond undoing."

"Where are we going?" Keziah broke into a trot, robes gathered in one fist, struggling to keep pace with him.

"Not we." He didn't slow. Pale mist coiled off his shoulders, thinning with every step, like smoke off a dying fire. "I'm nearly an empty vessel, Mother. I need the Tomb of Fallen Stars."

"Then warp there. It should be nothing to you." She said it with the easy certainty of someone who had watched him do harder things.

Zuri stopped walking.

The mist around him didn't just still, it recoiled, hissing, as though the words themselves had burned it.

Keziah stopped too, unsure what she'd touched. "Zuri?"

He was quiet long enough that the silence became its own kind of answer.

"That's the problem, Mother." His voice had gone flat, stripped of its usual command. "I cannot warp to the Tomb of Fallen Stars. It was sealed, by me. A ward so old that no subject of the Darkmoon can break it. Not even Trivia."

Keziah said nothing. There was nothing to say to that kind of silence in a god's voice.

"Ages ago," Zuri went on, and something in him seemed to fold inward, an old grief finding its shape again. "Not a thousand years. Tens, or perhaps, hundreds of thousands. When gods still walked among mortals, in the golden era of the Darkmoon, that place was called the Temple of Darkmoon. A sanctum where we manifested in the flesh. Pilgrims and believers came from every corner of the living realm to pay homage. We gave them power, harvest, good weather, peace. And in return, their faith fed our divinity."

He looked up at the wrong, close sun, something almost like pity crossing his face.

"We built our whole existence on that exchange. We stopped being able to imagine ourselves without it. And do you know what happens, when a concept becomes the only thing keeping you alive?"

Keziah didn't answer. She didn't need to.

"It becomes what unmakes you." He bit his lips. "The people began to question us, doubt the way of the gods. Their prayers stopped. In response, we panicked, struck at them, tried to force their faith back. That only hastened it. They rebelled, and our power went with them. We were weak, Mother. Weak enough for Erebus, the Primordial Darkness's own general, enemy to all the light touches, to find the gap and drive a blade through it. His host was more than we could hold back with what little strength remained. So I did the only thing a godhead could do in that hour: I sealed the temple myself. Marked it with a sigil that only the Darkmoon, whole and undivided, could ever break. I locked my own kind inside it to endure, until the day I could return and undo what I'd done."

The mist around him thickened, agitated, and Keziah understood exactly where this was going before he said it aloud.

"That comes to the end of the ages old Darkmoon history." A dry, humorless sound that might once have been a laugh. "You won't find a word of it in any scroll or scripture. It was never written down, deliberately. I trust now now you understand what has to happen, Mother."

"You need Trivia's strength."

"Correct." His eyes found the horizon, toward something only he could feel. "The only godhead still standing. Second only to the Darkmoon's own, Khonshu."

"Let me come with you." Keziah stepped closer, refusing to be left behind by this.

"Get to your people." The mist was climbing now, wrapping him to the face. "Gather the Wolf Kin High Fathers, the Senior Practitioners, the High Prelate. I'll go to Trivia myself. We meet at the long house of the fallen Warchief." His voice was already fading with the mist, distant even as he stood three feet away. "Make your preparations, Mother. The Darkness is at its full strength now, and it isn't waiting for us to catch up."

The mist closed over him whole, hissing once, and then there was only empty mountain air where a god had stood, and behind her, faint on the wind, the sound of Oma and Makena's quiet grief as they made their way down the path.



Zuri opened his eyes on the ethereal plane of the Darkmoon pantheon, and for one breath he almost didn't recognize his own domain.

The air still bent around him in recognition, still hummed with the old deference, but the silence beneath it was wrong.

No footsteps. No murmured prayer. No subjects to be found anywhere.

The great structures of gold and star-metal stood cracked to their foundations, waiting for the excuse to fall. The Sea of gold, which had never once in ten thousand years stopped moving, lay flat and still as a corpse. The eternal fountains had run dry.

His gaze climbed the ziggurat to where Trivia's throne sat, gleaming, untouched, and utterly empty.

"What's become of my pantheon? Is this what Erebus and the Primordial Darkness has left my great dominion for?" His voice came out low, and the ruined air answered it back in echoes. "My subjects, gone. My throne, unwatched. Is this what the Darkmoon has been reduced to?"

Nothing answered him but the faint shimmer of dying divine light.

His hands closed into fists.

"No further." The words left him like an oath. "This pantheon is the last ground that still stands against the Darkness, and it will hold. Erebus does not get to claim what remains of us. Not while I still draw breath as the Darkmoon."

He climbed the ziggurat with each step landing like a verdict, and the realm shuddered under him in answer.

Gold light bled up through his skin, silver armor closing over him plate by plate, a cape unfurling behind him on a wind that didn't exist a moment ago.

By the time he reached the top of the steps, his eyes had gone flaming hot, twin stars set into a face that no longer looked entirely mortal.

He stood before the empty throne and raised his voice until the whole ruined pantheon rang with it.

"I call to you. Come forth, Trivia."