Chapter 2. Truths and Reality

I quickly stood back up, clenching my fists as I glared down at this glowing painting. This voice could only be Salrak’s, and this device must be one of his demonic creations.

“Salrak!” I barked, pointing the knife in my hands at the painting and summoning my Holy Power. However, instead of the usual golden glow, a blood-red flame surrounded in darkness erupted, covering the knife in the blink of an eye. I widened my eyes and stopped using what was supposed to be my Holy Power. “What is the meaning of this?! What have you done to me?!”

There was a low sounding chuckle coming from the painting. It seemed like it couldn't transmit sounds at a higher level, so I didn’t quite understand what he was saying. I’d have to lower myself closer to it again, but… I didn’t know if this was a trap or if there was something else this painting could do.

I calmed myself, since I couldn’t feel magic in the painting, and lowered my ear again to it while keeping the knife between it and me as I listened to whatever Salrak was saying.

“…Don’t you think?” was all I could understand when I got closer to it again.

“I couldn’t hear what you were saying before, this artifact isn’t loud enough,” I replied, the frown on my face not lessening at all.

“Right…” Salrak sighed. “Pick up the phone and put it up to your ear so we can speak easier.”

I scoffed. “You must think I’m stupid.”

There was another chuckle from him. “This is a cell phone. It is not one of my artifacts—it’s not even an artifact at all. This is a complex contraption created by the people of this world.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said, clearly knowing that you couldn’t trust the Dark God—or any God for that matter.

“I have never lied to you, Althea. Don’t you remember how many times I warned you about trusting those… ‘Holy’ Gods?” he continued, and I frowned as I tried to remember if what he said was true.

The faith in me screamed to refuse him and deny his words, but… regardless of what he said or has said, it was a fact that the Holy Gods did betray me in the end and… I still didn’t know what happened to the world after that.

“Were you working with them? What happened after I died?”

Salrak laughed again. “I was never working with them. They hate me, after all. And…” he paused for a moment. “The world was destroyed by the ‘Holy’ Gods.”

I felt the blood drain from my face and I widened my eyes as I lifted myself up from the painting. “You’re lying!”

I heard Salrak’s voice coming from the painting again, and I remembered that I had to be closer to it to listen. “—to you? I was going to die just the same.”

“What? I couldn’t hear the first part,” I confessed, annoyed with this stupid painting.

I heard Salrak grunting from the other side. “Just pick up the damn phone.”

I hesitated for a moment, but eventually picked it up from the top of where the numbers were. It was heavier than I expected, but so far nothing happened. I brought it up closer to my face and kept it away with the knife to make sure I could destroy it—should anything unusual happen.

“Okay. Speak,” I said with the same hostile tone I always used with Salrak.

There was some silence from the painting, and as I was about to ask again, a sigh came out of it. “As I was saying… You gave me a fatal blow, so why would I lie to you? There is hardly anything I can do to you now.”

“And yet here I am, in some unknown place, looking completely different from how I was back then, with my Holy Powers replaced by yours,” I replied with an accusatory tone. “You said that the thing I’m holding was made by the people of this world, as if this place was in a completely different world. Explain.”

“Very well. First: I’ll tell you what happened to you, to our world, to me, and how you got here,” he said, taking in a mouthful of air as he prepared to continue. “I had worked for a long time with the intention to protect the same world you and I shared. I had hoped that the beings in our world could live their existence free from any higher power—”

I scoffed, interrupting Salrak. “If that was the case, then why did good people die at your forces’ hands?”

Salrak chuckled instead of getting angry at my impudence. “The people who believed in the freedom that I was offering them were only defending themselves from the zealots of the Seven that had been trying to destroy me and those who believed in me. Nothing more.”

“Yours were nothing more than demons who preyed on the weak!” I shouted, remembering all the ugly demons, ogres, and monsters that would populate Salrak’s forces.

“You call them demons… but tell me, Althea, did you ever bother getting to know them?” he asked a ridiculous question.

“Of course not. What is there to know about monsters, besides knowing how to kill them?”

Salrak hummed for a moment. “Those beings were just as sentient as you and yours, with dreams and families of their own who wanted nothing more than to live free. And most importantly…” he paused before continuing, “They were my creations.”

“I always knew they were yours,” I mocked when he stated the obvious.

“You, and the other races and species that populated our world were creations of all of the Gods, each one of us putting a part of ourselves to foster and grow,” he said, pausing for a moment as if giving me time to try to understand what he said.

“Huh? No, you are wrong. The Holy Gods created the world, and you invaded it with the desire to rule over it, cover it in darkness and hellfire, and torture the people for you own pleasure; according to the words of the…” I trailed off, remembering something important about that information.

“According to those Seven, isn’t that right?” he finished off where I trailed off. “But they killed you when you supposedly did their bidding. So is what they said truly the reality of our world?”

“I think… that…” I couldn’t finish what I wanted to say.

I was starting to doubt even the things I did for the Holy Gods, more so now that Salrak’s words seemed to explain their betrayal at the end.

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“We created that world for several reasons: One of them was a desire to use our Godly powers to sprout life beyond our existence; another one was simply out of boredom; and the most popular reason amongst us was simply as an experiment,” he said, making me frown as I continued to listen to his explanation.

“If that was the case, then why would they destroy it?” I asked, confusion growing within me the more I heard. “And why would you supposedly try to protect it?”

There was another heavy sigh from Salrak. “They all had their own reasons, just like with the creation of the world itself. But most of them simply saw how it grew exponentially beyond the initial power that was used to create it, and saw nothing in our creation beyond more power to be reclaimed. While another reason was just that the experiment had run its course and it was time to dispose of it, just like they did to you.”

“And what about you? Why didn’t you join them in our destruction?” I asked, feeling a pressure in my chest and my breathing turning unstable the more I heard him talk.

“I… had grown attached to that world. Initially I didn’t care much for it either and would’ve destroyed it just the same, but the more I saw how the beings we made grew, of how they struggled and overcame each obstacle in their chaotic life, the more I wanted to see of it and of the stories their lives created,” he replied, his voice growing softer as he went. “So when the time came, I decided I couldn’t allow it to be destroyed.”

“But… you were just one, why couldn’t they all descend into our world and take it right away?”

“Like I said: the world had grown powerful to the point that it could rival our own power. So when I descended first, my very presence combined with the power of the world wouldn’t allow their powers to break into the barrier it created, unless…” he trailed off, seemingly waiting for me to finish what he wanted to say.

And I knew. “Unless they transferred their own Godly power to a vessel in our world to take you down…”

“Exactly,” he agreed. “I knew I had lost when you broke my final barrier and felt their presence breaking into our world.”

That explained why he would simply allow me to pierce him at the end…

It was still difficult to accept what he was saying, but the reality was that it made sense, even more when I felt it in my body how the Holy Gods drained and disposed of me. They probably did the same to the world itself.

“If what you’re saying is true… if our world is gone… then where am I now?” I asked, tightening my lips as I tried to understand all the strange things around me.

“At the final moments, when you were gone from the world and the Seven were getting ready to take everything from it, I used what little remaining power I had to deny them from their goals, burning not only my existence but also my very soul to rescue as many beings from our world as I could,” he answered, his tone of voice much serious than before.

“Rescue them…?”

“I used all that I had—all that I was—and transferred as many beings as I could away from the Seven. However, they would have been able to catch me just as fast, so I brought what little remained after our wars to any world that I could find appropriate for our kind. Luckily, I found it. It’s the one that you’re now standing on right now,” he said, his voice growing confident the more he spoke. “Go ahead; open the curtains of this small room and look at it.”

I turned my attention to the curtain at the end of the room. There were bright rays of light coming from under it and I hesitated to walk over to it. But if what Salrak was saying was true, then I had no option but to do as he said.

I slowly made my way to the curtains, taking hold of it from one edge while carefully making sure not to drop the knife, and that the painting next to my face didn’t touch me. I took in a mouthful of air and then I moved it aside in one quick motion.

The bright light of the sun blinded me momentarily, and I narrowed my eyes, trying to take in as much as I could from the world outside this window. What stood before me was a sprawling city of buildings that stretched from a tall mountain range at my left to the horizon at my right, and maybe even beyond it in every direction. The buildings were a combination of red and gray of different sizes, but most striking of all, they were tall with angular squared shapes.

Between these buildings there were also dark gray roads, with shiny rectangular things moving along. Next to these roads, I could also see people walking around. And despite the few ones that were rushing, I could tell that still they moved as if nothing in the world was wrong.

“W-what… is…” I tried to speak, but the sight in front me left me speechless.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Salrak said with a playful tone of voice. “This is what a world free of Gods can turn into.”

“Free… of Gods…?” I asked before I frowned, remembering that there was one in this painting talking to me right now. “What about you?”

He chuckled no differently as he had been doing almost every time. “I am no God. I told you, I consumed myself and my soul to rescue our people to this world.”

“Then, how are you…?”

“This is nothing more than the little remnants of my will that remain in the atmosphere of this world from when I got here. It was quite the spectacle for the people of this world, but since then, they’ve somewhat gotten back to their normal lives—despite the little issues my arrival here created…” he answered, lowering his voice as he said that last bit.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing full well what ‘little issues’ meant for a mortal when a God said it.

“The… transferring of our people created a ripple effect on this world, and the power of my soul transformed into something that is common for us but completely unknown to them: Magic,” he replied, his tone of voice sounding somewhat awkward as he tried to explain it.

“The people of this world don’t have magic? How can that be?” I asked, looking at all the buildings there were, the way things were constructed and how people were living. “There must be some magic.”

“There was none. What you see is nothing more than these people’s ingenuity,” he said with an impressed tone. “But as for the magic, most of it was contained in the beings from our world, so most people in this world don’t have magic. However… the ones that do have it… they range from ones that do no more than a baby would do, to people that could rival you when you were starting as the ‘Hero of the Holy Gods’.”

“So they also have Heroes in this world…” I pondered, looking at every detail I could of this world from this small window.

“A handful of them, yes… which is good because…” he trailed off, worrying me as he did.

“Because…?”

“Some of the most powerful beings from our world also made it here, and they took a great deal of my power to get the same amount of power that they had, so it was chaotic for a while,” he continued, speaking quickly as if wanting to get over the issue as fast as he could.

“What?!” I shouted, leaning forward into the glass of the window.

“Calm down, Althea. That was five years ago and things are mostly under control now thanks to the people of our world that have managed to somewhat deal with it,” he said with a playful tone, as if what he was saying wasn’t a big deal.

“Five years!?” I exclaimed this time. “Why did I wake up just now!?”

Salrak cleared his throat before speaking. “You were much more difficult to transfer. On one side, you were dead, and on the other one, you were the most powerful being in our world, so bringing you here took more effort than I expected.”

“Is that why I look like this?” I asked, looking at my pale white hand with almost no imperfections.

“Yes. I didn’t have the power to bring you as the being that you were, especially when most of the power that you had back then was part of the power of the Seven.”

“Then… my holy power…” I pondered, trying to feel the power within me.

“Gone. However, since you had been a vessel for the Gods, that space was replaced with a part of my Godly powers,” he continued, and I stopped trying to feel for the holy power.

“You mean… my holy powers are now… Darkness and Hellfire?” I asked, hoping that that wouldn’t be the case.

“That’s right,” he replied, quickly shattering my hopes.

I grimaced at the idea that I had gone from being a Holy Knight to something akin to a Dark Knight, but then if he used his powers to transfer the people of our world… “What about the other beings? Are they also tainted by your powers?”

“Yes and no. None of them were vessels of the Gods, so my powers transformed to keep theirs as they had always been. For them, nothing’s changed, so they will never be able to use them, but… there is a way to transfer that power to you, making it your own, just as the holy powers you used to carry. How much of it you get would depend on how powerful the being is, be it a native from this world, or one from ours,” he said with a nonchalant tone of voice. “And that would happen if… you happened to kill them…”