ioche

v

He knew coming to the forests was a terrible mistake.

As Dolis feared, the calls for his guidance continued. Ranging from mourning cries, prayers, and rallying plagued his mind as the people flocked to the forests.

Help me!

Kill! Kill! Kill!

It started like a hum, growing intensely into a chant, an anthem of the people, patron followers of different gods fighting each other over resources in the forest, and riots in the cities. It grew by the day, hour, and minute.

Each second seemed to drag on for an eternity.

For Daelia! one cried.

"Stop!" Dolis held his clenched fists against his head, wishing he could beat the voices out of his head. He squeezed against his temples, hoping the pressure would be enough to distract from the painful sounds of the people of Estruela. When that didn't work, he took his frustrations out on a nearby tree.

A few hundred flattened trees later, Dolis was exhausted. The cries for help and rage hadn't been nearly as bad as the Great War, but the slow building up of pleas made Dolis fear that he would lose control over Dulo's blood. His fists bled, but it still wasn't enough to quench the thirst that Dulo's blood held over him.

Absent of pain, the sight of the blood was no surprise to Dolis, even if that blood was his and not a sorry mortal who had gotten in his way. He stared at it in amusement, wondering if there had been a way to filter the cursed blood out of him; he continued unleashing his rage on tree after tree. He'd keep going until all of it stained the earth, so long as it was out of his system—so long as he could live normally.

Anything to not be the god of destruction.

Dolis stared at the blood dripping to earth, darkening into a puddle against a few demolished trees. For a moment, he wondered what it would have been like as a mortal; indeed, with the amount of fallen blood, a mortal wouldn't have survived thus far. He knew it was impossible, but he wished he could be mortal just once, succumb to mortality and be a mortal in his father's realm, living out eternity as one of the dead.

Indeed it was better than being an immortal so disliked.

Kill them! Destroy the city! Siege! The voices returned. Dolis wished his mortal fantasies had been real, but this was his reality.

There was a feeble cry amongst the rubble of trees, so faint that if he hadn't been a god, Dolis wouldn't have noticed. But with the short fuse he was barely holding on to, he lunged forward, tossing one of the fractured branches towards the sound. "Enough!"

It cried once more in a higher pitch, and when it vanished, Dolis gathered enough of his senses to glance at the spot the branch had landed. A small bird's nest poked out from one of the larger branches among the shrapnel of twigs and decayed leaves. As Dolis removed a few of the larger twigs and leaves, he spotted the source of the cries.

A small bird rested inside; its body was broken in a couple of spots, limp and lifeless. It looked like one of the branches had gutted him.

"No," he said, cradling the small bird. It was so tiny that it had most likely been a baby, maybe a few days old. "No, no, no."

He hadn't meant it, never did when he'd give in to these bouts of rage. And, like always, someone—or some creature—would always get hurt. The bird remained motionless, void of any life it once had, as it made its last feeble cries of help.

Dolis was no stranger to death—quite the opposite—but there was something about witnessing a needless death, especially for one he caused, that made him hate everything about himself and his power.