Among skyscrapers, over cracked asphalt under rubber tires, beneath a black sky dotted with stars, the form of a human ascends. A sigh echoes over the city that watches with bated breath; the death rattle of an era as it bleeds into a new one.
“The King is dead! King Hummingbird is dead!” the cry echoes through the streets, mournful.
And yes, the King has fallen. Struck down by a pair of twins looking to steal the mantle as their own, she now bleeds over the floor of a great Hall inhabited by the city’s past and future Kings. The great Tree at the center of the city groans and creaks as the power of Hummingbird’s patron God seeps from its bark and the power of dozens of new Gods vying for purchase flows into it. Leaves ripple with thousands of colors and fall from the branches of the great Tree as new ones replace them.
The twin who dealt the killing blow to Hummingbird rises above the city, veins pulsating with the power of the patron God who selected them.
As they allow their patron God to select them, however, the sky lights up in blinding white, the crack of discharged electricity bursting the eardrums of all within a hundred meters. Thousands of volts course through the new King’s body, stopping their heart immediately and sending them careening down towards the ground.
The person who’d struck the killing blow, the younger Twin, rises into the air.
Many Gods would be content to let Hummingbird’s killer fall; leaving nothing but blood and viscera on the asphalt below to be pecked at by the birds.
One God, however, lets a ghost whisper into his ear.
And he changes fate with the touch of a finger.
YOU ARE READING
under the aegis of gods.
FantasyIn this world, cities are protected by Kings, which are humans or Otherkin chosen to wield the powers of a patron God. But what happens when two people kill the same King in an attempt to take the mantle, making them both pseudo-Kings? And if only o...
