A particularly interesting case study into the flexibility and mutability of the gods is that of the God of War.

Creutus is a widely worshipped and accepted god among the nations of the modern world, despite his portfolio being that of war itself. While he is the God of War, his tenets are quite strict on exactly how war may be waged, and his clerics and followers can often be found on battlefields making sure prisoners of war are treated humanely, safeguarding medical personnel and ensuring the safety of negotiators during negotiations such as ceasefires and prisoner exchanges.

All in all, his worship is welcomed in most cities in Aer and accepted in most societies. He is the god of choice of the professional soldier, despite - or perhaps due to - only intervening during wars if one side or the other performs egregious breaches of his tenets, such as the wanton execution of prisoners or the specific targeting of civilians with large-scale, destructive magics.

What many do not know, however, is his less than noble origins.

The concept of war is as old as sapience itself. The moment that the first groupings of individuals occurred, conflict between them was inevitable. Families, then tribes, then nations. Whether to secure resources, eliminate competition or simply to take the fruits of someone else’s labour for themselves, organized, large-scale murder has formed a part of every society in one way or another.

But during ancient times, war was nowhere as civilized as it is today. It was brutal and vicious, where the winner took all and the loser was driven off, enslaved or worse.

As such, there was no god of ‘war’ per se. Instead, there was Krutus: God of Carnage. All the brutality, all of the pain and suffering, all of the chaos and destruction that accompanied the process of two groups systematically trying to murder each other, all of that was his domain.

Even back then there was a realization that this kind of systematic slaughter was something different. Screaming tribal warriors used to chant his name and cut out the still beating hearts of their prisoners as sacrifices, or burned them alive on pyres, all to gain his favour.

Over time, as war became more formalized, with treaties and agreements and politics, worship of Krutus slowly fell out of favour. Yes, his blessings could provide an edge in battle, but the aggressive and combative temperament he encouraged in his followers was not conducive to building productive societies. The fundamental truth of war is this; that war has a cost, both to the aggressor and the defender, and the only group that profits out of it is the one that does not participate. Over time, the militaristic societies stagnated, while the ones that flourished were the ones that could grow peacefully, yet still defend themselves against outside aggressors.

And it is here that a most interesting event occurred.

If the gods were nothing but embodiments of their domains, nothing but slaves to their nature as some religious scholars posit, then that was where it would have ended, with Krutus as nothing but a historical footnote. An example of how societal and technological progress can overcome even a being as powerful as a god.

But gods, despite being ‘chained’ to their domains to some extent, in a manner not unlike the way the colour of certain flowers depends on the kind of soil that they are planted in, remain beings with intelligence far beyond that of mere mortals. Not only are they aware of their weaknesses, they are able to take steps to compensate for them.

For Krutus, the solution was simple: he re-branded.

Krutus became Creutus, the new, socially acceptable God of War, espousing honour in battle, treating your enemies with dignity and glory in combat. All the things that are celebrated in modern militaries.

His worship spread far and wide.

That, however, is not the end of the story. For you see, while on the surface the god of war may have changed, the nature of war itself has not. When you drill right down to it, war is still a brutal, nasty, vicious process of turning living, thinking beings into corpses at an industrial scale. It is still carnage and it is still mayhem, and so Krutus still lives.

Most Creutians deny this. If they even acknowledge his existence, they paint him as their antithesis, some dark, evil shadow of their own god’s beacon of light. But in Grailmane, in the City of Darkness itself, there is a sect of Creutus-worshippers that not only openly acknowledge his existence, but revere him as another aspect of their own god. So much so that they dedicate a section of their own religious facilities to Krutus.

And in that, by not denying the existence of the darkness at the heart of their own religion, they might be more honest than most.

- Neheb, L. Chapter 5 of The Nature of the Gods

For as long as he could remember, Samual had always worked with a plan.

When he’d wanted to steal apples off the tree in old man Joziah’s back yard, he’d had his younger brother, Tomaas, knock on the front door and distract the old fool while he climbed the fence. When he wanted to skip going to church on prayer day, he saved some of his soup from the previous dinner and used it to fake vomiting. The seduction of Ania, the merchant’s occult-fascinated daughter? Planned, from the first ‘accidental’ bumping into her to the final, teary-eyed farewell as she and her father left.

Those had been tests. Practice runs for his own abilities that he’d realized he was going to need going forward, and opportunities to learn where failure had little consequence.

But his true plans had been far grander.

Leverage his family’s title as minor nobility to form political connections. Use those connections to obtain a minor leadership post for himself on the borders, creating the opportunity to show initiative and make a name for himself. Slowly work his way up the Mitlan theological hierarchy through a combination of competence, connections, false piety and sheer ruthlessness. Work his way up to the Archpope himself and then, through foul means or fair, replace him as Mitla’s representative on Aer.

All in all, a neat and tidy little plan that he’d estimated would take him between twenty and forty years to accomplish if all went well.

And then he’d discovered his fate. Death at twenty five. Far too soon to reach any of his long term goals for wealth and power. Everything had collapsed around him. He was banished from his home, cut off from all of the resources he would have needed for his plans and his pretend-faith revealed for what it was: something convenient to him, to be discarded when required. All his time-lines were thrown into chaos, all his plans reduced to naught by a quirk of humour from the gods.

As all this had sunk in after his exile, he’d succumbed to a fit of rage. He’d struck out at the trees, the bushes, everything around him, flailing about as he threw rocks and screamed at the unfairness of it all.

Then, as he had sat against a tree with its bark freshly stripped, exhausted to the point of collapse both physically and emotionally, he’d had an epiphany.

He’d been aiming too low.

If the gods wanted to make themselves players on the board that was his life, then by all means, let them!

But as players, that meant their plans were fair game.

Becoming a god’s right hand? Bah, that sort of goal lacked ambition. He was not going to stop at becoming a mere pawn, oh no.

He, Samual, would become a god himself.

And once that decision had been made, everything else started falling into place. He traveled, searching for knowledge about his curse and the gods and how one could join their number. He knew it was possible; Mitla’s teaching specifically made mention that he had once been a mortal man, though unfortunately it never mentioned exactly how he’d made his ascension.

He prioritized and learned, then re-prioritized based on new information. He made plans and contingencies, then discarded them as they became obsolete. All the while, he pursued his goal with single-minded dedication, every ounce of his being turned to its accomplishment, every step of every day taking him closer and closer to where he wanted to be.

It was this path that led to him searching out Krutus, whose only adherents conveniently resided in the City of Sin, on the Mitlan border.

Obviously, the gods would be aware of him, the little upstart who thought he could rival them, but he knew he was no real threat to them. The same way a fish on the hook was no threat to the fisherman on the shore. But the thrashing and squirming of his attempts to escape his fate had to hold some manner of entertainment to the ageless immortals.

Betting on his entertainment value - but having a contingency plan in case it did not pan out - he’d approached the Creutian Temple and straight up requested an audience with Krutus.

Laughing him off at first, the Creutians were greatly shocked and surprised when Krutus accepted not only his request to speak with him, but also his offer of servitude.

In hindsight, he should have realized that the path to ascension could not lie in servitude to another god. Gods across Aer have countless servants, most of whom had been far closer to their god for far longer than he, and while there had been numerous recorded instances of them achieving practical immortality, living and surviving as long as their faith lasted, there had never been any recorded instances of these servants somehow achieving actual godhood.

While he learned much in service to Krutus, most of what he learned was deeply disappointing.

Sometimes, no matter how driven, no matter how focused and how dedicated you were, certain achievements were simply impossible. Seven months before his twenty-fifth birthday, he was forced to concede that reaching his goal of godhood in time before his death was simply that. Impossible.

His current path was, sadly, a dead end. While the knowledge that he gained was going be incredibly useful, based on what he’d learnt, even in his most optimistic estimates, the absolute earliest it was even remotely possible to achieve his goal of godhood was going to be a quarter of a century.

He’d considered asking the Nightmare Tree how he could accomplish it, but all of the wisdom he’d scraped together on the Tree and how to best obtain usable knowledge - obviously he’d gathered knowledge before he’d gone in - had said not to ask questions that you already knew the answer to, or knew to be impossible. The tree could - and did! - tell people that their desire could not be achieved and then they wasted their question.

And Samual could not afford to waste his question.

Instead, he’d pivoted to his backup strategy: focus on breaking his fate first, and then, once he’d accomplished that and bought himself some time, return to his quest for godhood.

And so he got stuck with Rita.

Insisting she stay with him had been a snap decision, made without the careful forethought that usually characterized his plans, but it had made sense at the time. If he wanted to keep her safe, where better than under his roof, where he could keep an eye on her around the clock?

But now that she was here, he found himself out of sorts. Disrupted. His whole routine thrown out of balance.

He couldn’t even plan dinner without interference.

“Like this?” he asked, holding up the cutting board.

“No, you need to chop the onions way finer than that! Dice them!” Rita insisted.

She took up most of his tiny kitchen - the one that was attached to Krutus’s annex to the main temple - but she’d insisted on taking over as soon as he told her what he intended to cook them both for dinner.

Samual’s fingers clenched around the handle of the knife. What was wrong with a simple seared cut of steak each? She should have been happy that the Creutians had had some freshly butchered meat in their cold-room for him to ‘borrow’.

But no. She’d insisted that if they were going cook steak, they were going to do it properly, with caramelized onions and vegetables on the side.

Why? Why not just eat the steak today and the vegetables tomorrow? It was all just so… so… pointless! Meaningless effort that could be better spent on training, or planning, or preperation, or…

“Yes! Like that!” she exclaimed. “Wow, you really know how to handle a knife!”

Samual snorted as he handed the board of onion pieces to Rita to add to the pan. Of course he did. He’d practiced. He’d practiced a lot. He’d had to in order to sufficiently impress Krutus. It had all been part of the plan.

“And now we add the steak,” Rita lectured him, dropping the dripping hunks of meat into the red-hot pan with a sizzling hiss. She’d slathered the thing in enough oil to light a lamp.

“Make sure you don’t burn it. I don’t like my steak dry,” he remarked grimly.

“Don’t worry, this isn’t my first time in the kitchen,” she said with a laugh. “Or cooking steak. Two medium-rares, coming right up!”

Well, it wasn’t like he had anything specific he had to do. Spending some time making Rita feel at home was likely a good investment. And if that meant enjoying some good food in the process, well, it was simply a sacrifice that would need to be made.

Alright, Samual had to admit, there was something to Rita’s cooking. The steaks were, in a word, fantastic. Far better than simply throwing them on the pan.

But, in the end, it didn’t matter. The purpose of food was the intake of energy and nutrients so you could work at your best, and taste was irrelevant to that. Not worth spending effort on.

On the other hand, what was worth spending effort on, was keeping Rita alive. He had not yet really come with with a satisfactory plan for accomplishing this - there were simply too many variables and too many unknowns to properly plan it out - but he had some ideas.

Teaching Rita how to fight had been the first thing he’d decided, way back in the Nightmare already. The problem was that he didn’t know how she was supposed to fight. All of his knowledge about stances, techniques and styles related to bipedal, humanoid beings that walked upright with two arms and two legs. He knew some of the theory in terms of centaur styles, mostly in terms of how to fight against them, but he wasn’t sure it was applicable to Rita.

Centaurs were chargers, and used their superior speed to do hit and run attacks with lances. In close engagements, they tended to be bulky, but vulnerable, and they struggled to defend their larger bodies with the same size arms.

Rita, on the other hand, was smaller than the average centaur and therefore should be able to better protect herself, but she was also far slower. She could make surprising speed with her skittering gait, but from what Samual had seen, he doubted she would be able to outpace even a human at full sprint.

“What’s up?” Rita asked, swallowing the last of her steak and breaking the awkward silence that they had been eating in.

“Hmm?” Samual raised a questioning eyebrow.

“You’ve been staring at me for the last five minutes. What are you thinking about?” Rita asked.

They were seated at the small table where Samual had shown her the Tarot cards. Apparently it was the only option they had if they didn’t want to eat on their laps, or in Rita’s case, on her front legs.

“Thinking about the similarities between you and centaurs,” he replied.

“Oh gross, no, I’m not interested,” Rita said immediately, her face pinched in a disgusted scowl. “Did you see how hairy he was? And filthy, eww. And then there’s the whole horse… -thing. No. Just no.”

Samual blinked in confusion for a few moments before he realized she was talking about the centaur that they’d passed upon entering the city. It took a few moments more before he realized what she was talking about.

“I meant,” he replied flatly, “in terms of combat style. Not as a… romantic option. That aspect of your life is your business. I want no part of it.”

“Oh,” Rita said, a blush forming on her cheeks. “Right. So, why were you thinking about that?”

“Because I’m going to teach you how to fight and I need to figure out what to teach you.”

This time, there was no immediate protest from her, like there had been in after they’d left the Tree. Instead, she just eyed Samual evenly for a few moments as she mulled it over.

“That is probably a good idea,” she admitted eventually, then sighed before popping a piece of potato in her mouth. “I don’t want to fight. I’m a bit of a pacifist I suppose. But this place, this world? It doesn’t seem to want to give me a choice.”

Samual grimaced. “Grailmane is a dangerous place. There’s a reason it’s called the ‘City of Sin’. Everyone here can either fight or is protected by someone who can. Either that or you’re a victim.”

“I thought Grailmane was called the ‘City of Demons’?” Rita asked, spearing another piece of potato with her fork. They’d come out really well, he had to admit.

“It’s called that too,” Samual replied, picking at his vegetables. “It’s called a lot of things. City of Demons, City of Sin, City of Magic, The Forbidden City, The Nightmare City because it’s the largest, closest city to a Nightmare Tree, The City of Crime and several others that are not repeatable in polite conversation. It all depends on where you’re from.”

“So, there’s no police or city watch or something to keep the peace?” Rita asked, returning to that point. “If I walk down the street and someone just stabs me, nobody would lift a finger?”

“If someone tried to stab you on the street, I’d shatter every bone in their body,” Samual replied calmly.

“But if you weren’t protecting me…” Rita tried.

“If you had no protection and were unable to protect yourself, the necromancers would be on your corpse before it had time to cool,” Samual stated. “Other than that, yes. There would be no consequences for the individual who stabbed you.” Samual shrugged. “Each district is controlled by one of the big factions. Either a magelord or an institution, like the Academy. Their level of interest in what goes on in their district varies, but mostly people look after themselves. Somehow, it works.”

Rita stared at him for a few moments.

“Wow, this place really is a shithole,” she finally said. “Fine, you’ve convinced me I’m going to need to learn how to fight if I don’t want to end up dead in a ditch somewhere. So you’re going to teach me to fight like a centaur?”

Samual shook his head. “No. Your build is too different. It wouldn’t work.”

“What do you mean?” Rita asked.

“Centaurs are human torsos on the body of a horse,” Samual explained. “That means they have four legs, all going straight down and the ability to gallop and canter, which is to say, run very fast.”

“You, on the other hand,” he continued, gesturing towards Rita’s knees that rose to above the height of the table, “have eight legs, extending from the sides of your body. These are both an additional strength as you can kick sideways and have increased stability, but they are also a vulnerability. They can be attacked and crippled and since you still have only human arms, having enough reach to protect them could be a challenge.”

“I have a spear…” Rita tried, but Samual shook his head.

“A spear can only point in one direction at a time.”

“Are you saying you don’t know how to teach me to fight?” Rita asked, surprised.

“I’m saying, I don’t know how to teach you how to fight yet,” Samual replied, a faint smile on his face.

Who knows? This might even be… fun.