Twilight of the Gods ✔️

Chapter 36: The Forgotten Sister

At the beginning of time, there were two brothers, Anhel and Odi. History knew them as the First Lover and the Original Traitor, the twin suns that brought life to the Mortal Realm. But few remembered their lonely sister, Nyx, bearer of the moon.

Indeed, the scattered groups that did worship her even called her the Forgotten Sister in their books, but those texts were long lost to libraries buried underneath collapsed civilizations. What mortals used to pray to her for, few can say. But the legend of the Lady of the Night remained alive among the necromancers who sought her counsel.

The spell books they read would have spoken of Matthius, Keeper of the Dead and her faithful servant. The pages would have told them to seek him out in the tallest mountains or the deepest seas or wherever it was he felt like being in the moment. They would have only referred to her as a great darkness they would have to confront to get what they wished after capturing him. This was how she ended up first meeting Haydn, crying over the bloody, mangled body of his soulmate Evelyn.

Nyx never liked humans. When she saw her brothers create the creatures of the Mortal Realm, she thought that their designs were clumsy. "Flawed" didn't even begin to describe the weak flesh beings they poorly sculpted.

She didn't understand why they kept dying. Disease, famine, blades, and magic all struck them down like flimsy paper dolls. She especially hated it when they killed each other.

"Why do you let them live?" She asked her brothers this as they fastened their suns to the smooth, blue fabric of the sky.

"They're fun to watch," Odi said. "They think their little lives are so important. I can never really predict what they will do."

Anhel laughed at his response. "You can say the same about the monkeys. I let them live because it's fascinating watching them grow. They can perceive us as infinite giant creatures. Some say they even love us, building temples and monuments in our names. I simply like looking after them."

A sparkling warmth had come to his eyes when he described the humans. While she still didn't understand his love for them, from then on, she began to watch the humans more carefully.

She paid attention to their little lives, realizing that they were far more intricate than her brothers hinted at. They struggled from birth till death, falling in love, dealing with loss, and supporting those around them. There were hierarchies too, the haves and have-nots, peasants and royalty.

But there was one group of humans in particular that stood out to her. Amid all the chaos and violence that her brothers were so fond of, there were always the victims. In the aftermath of war, there were grieving mothers, disfigured soldiers, and lost children, each left stranded by the tangled threads of fate.

Nyx thought it was unfair that they were forced to suffer. She took it upon herself to be a protector of the defenseless, granting them a dark shield against the world's cruelties. She would grant them shelter and a place to rebuild, letting them become whole again.

For a while, she enjoyed her role as a faceless guardian. She liked bringing joy to the short lives of these mortals and even saw herself serving them for the rest of her immortal life. But then she received a harsh reminder of why she hated humans in the first place.

She, in all of her godly wisdom, had made the mistake of saving the wrong person.

It was during another war between the Ylivian nation-states. Things had gotten particularly brutal that time around. Most wars were a fight for resources, but this one was a battle for revenge. Soldiers fought with pure hatred in their hearts instead of survival, slicing each other open with a sadistic glee she had never seen before. For once, humanity horrified her.