Gods, mused Lilin as he chipped carefully at the stone, have exceptionally valuable corpses.

Even now, thousands of years after the Purge of the Heavens, remnants of their divine forms lay scattered throughout the world. Any on the surface had been stolen in ages past, but buried beneath there still hid fragments that could be reclaimed.

“You needn’t be so cautious,” Lilin’s master hissed in his ear. “You waste time.”

Lilin’s hands jerked unconsciously into a quicker rhythm, his master’s commands superseding caution or sense. The chisel tapped and stone fell away, dust filling Lilin’s mouth with the taste of earth. For a time he worked in mindless rhythm, the echo of his chisel a steady ping-ping-ping that echoed and rebounded in all directions until it sounded like a dozen miners worked here and not only one.

Then the sound changed. A resounding shiiiing, like a struck bell, echoed out with enough force that Lilin dropped his chisel and fell to the ground, hands clutching his ears desperate to block the noise.

A glint of otherworldly wrongness showed between white-edged slate, like the brightest gold and the darkest sky fused into a single incomprehensible non-colour.

Lilin felt his master’s sigh of pleasure. “Yes! That is it. Bring it!”

Lilin retrieved his chisel and resumed his work. Every time he slipped and struck the god-fragment, he flinched away from the unbearable sound, but his master’s increasingly urgent demands drove him back to the task again and again.

Finally, when he thought his arms may fall off from weariness, the fragment lay revealed. Sharper than diamond, harder than adamant, curved and jagged like a broken cylinder, the piece hurt to look at and Lilin trembled at the thought of touching it.

“BRING IT!” his master roared, and Lilin tentatively reached out. The fragment felt like ice, like magma, like grabbing a naked blade coated in acid, and Lilin screamed and dropped it, wringing his hand. Panting, he brought the light closer, but saw no wound, no cut, no burn. Only a faint shimmering of dark-gold wrongness that faded even as he stared.

It made his heart race, and forbidden thoughts flickered through his mind. If touching it could change him, could he swallow it? Could he use it like any other power, absorb its essence? Could Lilin, perhaps, become a god himself?

“BRING IT TO ME, NOW!”

Lilin had the fragment in his hand before he quite registered his master’s command, sprinting down the tunnel toward the temple, waves of utterly contradictory sensation thrumming through him in time with the pulse of blood through his trembling limbs.

Lilin ran, but the nearer he drew to his master’s throne, the more the weight of the command began to fade. He sensed his master’s eagerness, the distraction. He’d been running for hours and would run for hours more, but then in a single impulsive motion he brought the fragment to his mouth and swallowed it whole.

“NO!”

Burning endless freezing agony consumed him so completely that he wished not to exist, as fervently as he’d always clung to life.

His wish was not granted. He lived. He endured the unendurable, and gradually he began to understand the world in ways he never had before.

The earth around him, the distant lapping of water against an unfamiliar set of living things far above. The all-consuming anger and hatred of his once-master.

As Lilin regained consciousness of himself he knew he had ascended. Not to godhood, not even close, but to something far more potent than he’d been before.

“Come to me,” begged the voice he’d always served, but Lilin no longer felt any compulsion to obey.

“No,” he whispered, and then laughed, reveling in the freedom and power of it. “NO!” he shouted. “No, I will never obey you again. You are not my master. You… you are my enemy. And I will grow strong enough to destroy you. The others you hold against their will… they are mine. I will free them, and you will fall.”

“Come back to me, slave…” The voice echoed, insidious, trying to reclaim him.

And yet his master’s voice - no, the voice of his enemy - could not stop him. Nothing he did or said mattered any longer.

Lilin laughed. “I am no slave. I am Lilin. Remember my name, for it is one you shall hear again.”

Even if his enemy wanted to send slaves after Lilin, it would be days before he could muster a force. And by then, Lilin would be long gone.

Their mental link connected them across so vast a distance it had always felt close, but in reality Lilin had been one of the furthest-flung of his master’s subjects, searching far and wide for fragments of the ancient gods. This was the first he’d ever found.

It would not be the last.