“In the beginning, there were the gods.

Untold numbers of them, fickle and petty. With domains as vast as the skies and as minute as strings of iron and clashing wills of infinite power, the Creation they brought into existence wilted.

No god agreed on what their Creation should be. Eons passed as they fought, endless war bearing only poisoned, rotting fruit.

As gods are wont to do, they grew bored of the monotonous war, and agreed to retreat from their Creation, only lending an influence when the little beings covering it sought them out.

This, we are told, is the story of magic.”

- An excerpt from “On the Gods and Sorcery” by Fenn I, first recorded Queen of Tayan

12 years ago

In the east, there lay a deity who had forgotten its own name.

Once, it had been powerful, feared amongst even its own brethren. Once, it had claimed the corpses of its fellow gods to fuel its own unquenchable fury.

Now, it lay broken, an ancient terror that the world had passed by. Now, the fragments of divinity past clung to it stubbornly, pieces of long-dead gods melding with it, becoming part of it.

The broken god, searching for someone to give it a purpose, lay close to the surface of Creation, merely cloaking its presence rather than removing it, lying under a temple physically rather than spiritually.

Shattered though its godhead might be, it still retained power. Tendrils of divine influence spread from its disused temple, searching for an appropriate host.

It had been half an eternity since the last time it had found a suitable vessel for itself. Who could pact with it, when its mind did not even recognize what it sought in a mortal? It was so fragmented by stolen shards of the divine, the remnants of gods it had killed warping the very fibre of its being, and the inexorable mistress of time had done little but worsen it.

It cast its tendrils of godly power out almost aimlessly, its perception expanded drastically through an unconscious reflex built and refined across millenia of existence.

And for the first time in many, many years, it was not left wanting. There was a living mortal that held the potential to bond to it.

The broken god did not understand itself. It did not know its reasoning for selecting mortals to contract with. What it did know, however, was that this mortal felt instinctually right, as if its soul had been attuned to the god, searching for a pact.

This mortal… it was a male, fully grown. The god reached into his soul, only to find the marks of others already present.

A dozen oaths for a dozen gods. Half again that in oaths discarded or broken. A veritable pantheon of gods had made contact with this man.

Interesting.

Expanding its perceptions, the god observed the mortal through its own eyes.

It witnessed a scene of massacre. A temple desecrated and slaughtered. Hundreds of connections to other gods severed, lost divine power boiling away from corpses.

A strong resonance. This one would serve excellently.

The broken god addressed the man, expressing its intent in a flood of images and half-formed words.

[PACT]

With its proposal, it sent a fragment of its own divinity to mark the man’s soul. The soul opened itself to the broken god, and it connected itself to the mortal.

It would watch this one with anticipation.

Before it rested, however, it realized that the initial resonance it had sensed was not alone.

The god had not witnessed this in aeons. Its curiosity heightened, it followed the resonant thread to its target, observing. A weaker one, this, but its mere presence was already an abnormality.

This mortal was a female. A child, just about to enter the years in which its body would mature, secretly observing an event from afar. A series of executions.

The god peered into the souls of those involved, examining them as blade met mortal bodies and spilled their lifeblood. A similarity. The child appeared to be offspring of two of the ones waiting for their ends.

Hate marked the child’s soul, but the broken god soon discovered the child’s loathing was not for her family’s killers.

“With this ends House Byron,” the child whispered, matching the words of the executioners. “You stole my birthright from me, Father.”

Clasped in the child’s hands was a book, a tome so ancient that it even stirred a sense of familiarity in the god.

The child looked down at the book, eyes scanning archaic script. She started chanting, a low and steady beat that reminded the god of its home, long lost to the ages.

[PACT]

The broken god stirred in surprise. It had not been the one to speak.

“I need power,” the child muttered. “As much as I can, or I’ll never mend my family’s idiocy.”

The god accepted. The pact was made.

A killer, fueled by innumerable faiths. A child, driven by hate of her own blood.

The broken god would watch them with interest.