Althos' physical body was now closer than ever to the top of the deceased desert titan's body. And at that moment a minor disaster struck: the followers of the fungal lord regained their ability to smell.

The rapidly rotting corpse of the sovereign of the sandy wastes had been radiating a rank miasma as a result of the heinous wounds that resulted in the thing dying in the first place. The odor's effects had been suppressed by Althos minutes ago when the deity made use of a spell from a school he rarely used: alteration.

The creatures who were ascending alongside their master grimaced as they were buffeted by wind, and assailed by the noxious scent wafting off of the corpse. Althos' physical body, possessed and controlled by the multi-willed entity's secondary will, heard them retch and immediately sprung to action.

The main will uses magic... I can too! The entity thought, aiming at the native creatures who had joined him and then recasting the penultimate spell the body had cast.

The party members continued to retch, needing a second to recover from the scent's potent assault on their sense of smell, but the entity in control of the physical body of Althos heard the retching noises they made significantly lessen in intensity. The entity smiled as it continued its vertical ascent.

Drow starred at the space from which he heard Althos' voice ring out whenever the odd entity spoke as he took in the implications of what his master had told him. There was a look that managed to be an odd mixture of skepticism and relief on his face, contorting his gloomy features into an expression that communicated his pain as only a dark elf's facial features could.

So does he want to confront my parents? If he does... I want to be there. The dark elf thought, his anger towards his parents blinding him to both the will of his master and towards the logic of feeling to a safer destination.

Althos, having learned a lot about the subtlety of body language while reliving the early memories of Mahmud, saw the pain in Drow's expression. The dark elf's master knew that he had healed the creature's physical wounds, but now Althos needed to heal the dark elf's emotional wounds.

What can I do here? How do I heal emotional wounds? Althos asked himself, frustration emerging as he wondered what to do to persuade the stubborn dark elf to obey him. As the mercurial alpha gazed at the dark elf, the emotions within the devious creature's gaze shifted from the mixed feelings he felt to a more direct desire to be disobedient, to deviate from what his master told him to do. This angered Althos, whose thoughts took an authoritarian bent.

Should I use magic? Force him to obey me? Althos briefly wondered, before mentally chiding himself. No. No! If I want to be obeyed willingly I need to become a master worth obeying without relying on compulsion. He thought, growing angry but this time at himself and his own instinctual laziness.

Althos took a deep breath to center himself and waited a moment. He allowed his mind to calm down and contemplated how to produce the best result possible from this scenario. What is my goal here? He asked himself, trying to create something to focus on, to work towards.

I want Drow to be safe, which he isn't here, and I want to confront and humiliate those who hurt him. He thought, his mind focusing around those central objectives. In doing this he willed away petty distractions and at least for the moment, his focus undid the harm done towards his limited patience by Drow's continued disobedience and the fact that now Althos needed to learn how to navigate the treacherous pathways of the heart.

How can I achieve that? He asked, after thinking for a few moments, time passing by slowly as his dark elf servant looked at him with that same frustration evoking an expression of desired disobedience. Seconds passed and he realized he should speak next. For some reason Drow wasn't going to do it, so Althos knew that he should. Let's just be honest here. He thought, deciding to take a quick risk after moments of tense and awkward silence.

"Listen to me. I came here to help you, and to confront those who hurt you. In order to help you, I got Milene to open up her workshop and tell me that she's got space in it for you. She's expecting you. She's waiting for you. You being here while I confront your parents might grant you some immediate gratification, but you wouldn't be safe. I care about your safety and want you out of this place." Althos told the dark elf, the tone of his voice leaving no doubt as to how serious he was.

Drow considered what his savior had told him. He was quiet, his face pained as he thought about the god’s words. Someone is performing an act of kindness for me… an act of kindness that is not at all small. The dark elf told himself, realizing that for the first time. That rose the significance of Althos’ words. It also made Drow view his sometimes traveling partner Milene more fondly. Drow looked at where Althos’ voice sometimes came from and the dark elf began to speak.

“My failure here is negatively affecting, inconveniencing someone else, someone who owes me nothing and is no relative of mine. And now that person is waiting for me to show up, offering me a small act of mercy, which my continued presence here prevents me from accepting. My pride may accidentally cause her to be offended.” Drow told his master, honesty seeping into his voice. His face paled as he felt shame. Althos, though far away, looked at the dark elf with a confused expression.

“Why would she be offended?” He asked, genuinely confused by the dark elf’s statement. Drow looked away from the spot from which he heard the deity’s words before he responded, moved to do so out of shame.

“If she does not understand why I’ve not yet shown up, she may think of me as rejecting her act of kindness. It’s the way her aunt would think. A quick rush to judgment and a fiery outburst. To be clear, I am not rejecting her act of kindness, but I do not want to leave just yet. I want to be here.” The dark elf stated. He got quieter when mentioning Qu’Ren as if the mere mention of her was enough to alert her as to his words.

Althos laughed when he heard his followers’ explanation. Seconds later he spoke quickly, offering a surprising reassurance to the dark elf. “I might be unintentionally strengthening your desire to stay here by saying this but the truth is that Milene is not like her aunt." The disembodied voice told the dark elf.

"I’ve only done a superficial analysis of their memories, I’ve gained an incredibly shallow understanding of the two of them, but I can tell you that they are not the same.” He said, honestly and openly comforting his follower.

The dark elf’s face seemed to regain some of its color when the god said that. He seemed to consider what the deity said a lot more seriously at that moment. And at that moment, the deity had an idea that he momentarily considered. It came to him in a flash of inspiration. If Drow is serious about staying and fighting... could I mutate him, temporarily? He wondered, having explored his mutations menu for the first time just minutes ago.

The deity's mind conjured the image of the lower body of a girtablilu with Drow's upper body and face. The image was an intimidating one, and would almost certainly empower Drow enough to fight his family. Althos considered it, but was surprised to hear Drow's next words, which interrupted the deity's thoughts.

"I will go to Milene. She has done me an act of great kindness... if it were anyone else I'd likely not take them up on their offer, but Milene is special." The experienced explorer told Althos. There was an emotion the formless god was unfamiliar with, in the oracle's voice. It intrigued him.

Althos did a quick assessment of Drow's body language. He studied his servant and worshiper to see how the multi-classed dark-elf was feeling. Althos heard the dark elf's heart beating in his chest, and was surprised that it wasn't the calm heartbeat of someone who was about to drift off to bed, but the sort of frantic hammering that the memory-thief heard in Mahmud's heart whenever the titan had walked by brothels.

Is there a part of him that now thinks of Milene as a mate? Althos questioned his naive mind only loosely familiar with complex emotional concepts beyond hatred, and his understanding of love and mating came to him through the lens of a polygynous society. It took him a second to arrive at a more nuanced possibility. No... he is probably debating how he feels about her now that he knows that she would do something so generous. Althos thought.

I wonder if the dark-elf thinks it's because it's him that Milene is doing this? No... he's not that arrogant. Althos figured, grinning. The young thing was wrong. At that moment the possibility that he had dismissed was precisely what was going through Drow's mind. But Drow being wrong, for the moment, suited Althos' agenda and protected his lone-oracle.

The shapeless entity instantly prepared the teleportation-effect he had at his disposal, but before he used it to whisk the dark elf out of what was once his home he spoke to his follower.

"It is almost time for you to leave this place. When you arrive in Milene's workshop do your best to aid her. In light of this, and a few things I learned from Qu'Ren, I shall, at least for the time being, take a bit more of a direct approach to our efforts here. I shall be calling a meeting of the three of you soon. Perhaps even later today." He told his servant.

Althos took a second to create an updated copy of Drow's memories. Given the fact that the relevant parts were just the last few days, the deity performed an in-depth examination of those memories, maintaining his scattered consciousness while doing the procedure.

He did this to truly understand what his servant had gone through, and because of how much shorter it was than the part of the titan's life was, it was done far faster than his considerable studies of Mahmud's early life were.

While Althos was experiencing some of the worst days of the dark elf's life, the dark elf himself nodded at his master, understanding and being excited at the possibility of Althos' more direct involvement. And then the dark elf was gone.

The moment the dark elf was whisked away to his friend and fellow cultist' workshop, Althos' physical body ascended over the top of the desert titan. And the party of desert-dwelling creatures laid their eyes on the deceased tyrant's rotting torso.

From their aerial vantage point, they could see the strange things Althos had detected but hadn't been able to properly see while walking towards the titan. The clothing it wore was riddled with strange, parasites. Innumerable swarms of the human-sized creatures silently walked on top of the thing's breezy outfit and occasionally idly making holes in the thing so that more of their kin could appear.

They looked like gigantic beetles, each bigger than the jackaloids in their human forms. They possessed dense exoskeletons, numerous legs that ended in cruel-looking hooks so as to secure their footing on the strange, flowy material they dared to walk on top of, and pairs of wings hidden under dense natural plating. Their exoskeletons ranged in color from bright green to dark blue, and the insects divided themselves up based on the color of their exoskeletons.

The jackaloids watched the things emerge from the holes on the titan's outfit and made a macabre realization. That's probably why the corpse started rotting so fiercely so soon after this thing fell. They both thought, realizing that if the insects were eating the corpse that would cause it to rot faster.

Previously the two shapeshifters had wondered why something this massive would begin to emit such a powerful and awful scent so quickly but they hadn't had any reason to come to the conclusion that this was the cause.

Althos' second will momentarily considered making contact with one of the things mentally, but it quickly shook off that moment of initiative. No... this sort of thing is something the main will has never encountered before. I should leave it to him. It thought, lacking confidence in its ability to use true godly powers, the sort of which might have been useful in aiding it if fighting broke out here.

I wonder if Drow is being obstinate... The female dark elf who, minutes ago had closed her eyes, thought. She was deep in thought, having closed her eyes to allow her mind to focus on what was on her mind, as opposed to processing useless sights.

The dining room she was in was still silent even though the room's two inhabitants had finished their meals. Their plates hadn't been collected yet, but the male dark elf sitting across from her could hear the soft footsteps of servants approaching, presumably to collect their used silverware.

Once Drow had been teleported out of the palatial residence Althos reflected on what the dark elf had gone through.

His power over memory allowed him to experience the entire ordeal. Althos felt Drow's enthusiasm when he returned home and explained that he had become an oracle. He felt the dark elf's excitement when Drow told his parents about the mysterious god who empowered him and gave him a quest.

And then he saw the look on their faces change. Grow wicked. Malicious. Drow felt weird about that. In his eyes, the change came out of nowhere!

Althos felt Drow's pain when the dark elf's berserker father punched him for the first time. And the second. And the fourteenth. He felt the fear that crept into the dark elf's heart when Drow realized that he was losing consciousness. And then he felt the residual aches and pains the dark elf endured, as well as the oracle's mental struggle over whether or not to contact him.

He felt the dark elf's complex ties to his parents erode over the next few nights. When the dark elf first awoke after losing consciousness, in his room, he felt angry and hurt. Then he tried to leave and realized he couldn't. So he waited. Minutes of anger and pain turned to hours of loneliness and fear. Which, over the course of days transformed into a bitter, murderous hatred. But there was something else there too.

Drow was afraid. He was afraid for himself, but he was also afraid of something else. He was afraid of failure. The dark elf had opted to come to his family first because he wanted to convert his family into a cult dedicated to his god. The god who had given him the right to call himself an oracle.

He was afraid that he had failed. Knowing that I came here and I couldn't get another member of the Banethal family to join me... it hurts. Was something that repeated itself throughout the dark elf's memories. The dark elf had sincerely wanted his family to serve Althos.

My service alone isn't much, but my family... all of us... if it's us together, our service can mean something. It can be of use to this strange... kind god. The dark elf told himself, repeating that over and over in his head during the trek from the tunnel to the city. Althos, feeling a shallow imitation of compassion, felt pained knowing that his servant had wanted something so badly, only to be denied it. But the deity's heart was maturing, slowly.

Althos' emotions had always been rash and intense, shifting rapidly from placidity or apathy to intense, only loosely justifiable, bursts of anger or rarely contentedness. But this was the first time that Althos witnessed a shift that was both logical and dramatic. Witnessing it firsthand darkened the deity's outlook at this situation. Which he realized, thanks to his sharpened focus on his own actions and feelings.

He was aware that if he moved now he'd act out of malice. So he waited. He took a deep breath and calmed himself. And to pass the time he looked around the chamber he was in.

It was a spartan place, consisting of very little even in terms of what was functional.

The chamber was large enough to house a horde of expensive furniture, but most of what Althos saw around him, his incorporeal eyes peering through the darkness with ease, was furniture that completely emphasized function over form. He saw a simple, large bed, a dresser that he knew contained the assorted clothes his servant wore in his down-time and a few other pieces of furniture that served a real purpose.

There was a mirror, a washbasin, and a closest that a simple scan of Drow's memories revealed contained suits of armor the dark elf wore on expeditions to the world above the city.

While examining the room, the deity grew bored. He also felt his heart lose the maliciousness that Drow had been feeling. And so he began to move.

The desert-dwellers were sailing over the desert titan's corpse. Each of the native desert-dwellers watched the beetle-like creatures on the titan, eyeing them cautiously. They weren't fond of the overly large insects and weren't eager for such things to turn their eerie attention on them.

Only Althos' secondary will had its eyes glued straight to the horizon. The thing was flying towards a specific destination: the city of Namira. It wasn't far away, the party just had to get to a place that was beyond the corpse, and was closer to the city.

In time the party finished crossing the meters long roadblock that was the corpse of the titan. And before long Althos' secondary will, using his main will's senses could see positively enormous buildings way off in the distance.

The tallest of these buildings was over five kilometers tall, sailing far taller than anything Althos had ever seen, even the apartment of the deadly devil Paimon. It was a delicate-looking thing, made of a substance that looked like purple glass. As a consequence of its height and its construction it possessed an air of elegant nobility.

It was also something that was not known to Althos, meaning it was something that sprung into being further along in Mahmud's life later than Althos was familiar with. And the secondary will was flying straight towards it. Flying towards the unknown.

Althos looked out at the door that let visitors in and out of Drow's chamber. When Drow had tried to open it, the thing didn't respond. He thought about what to do for a second and then figured that his incorporeality would handle locked doors well. As he did that, he heard echoing footsteps from far away going off somewhere.

The deity stepped through the door, not experiencing an ounce of resistance as he did so. When he was on the other side of the door he spun in a circle to see his surroundings.

When he looked around his new surroundings he found that he was in a long and wide hallway that led to other parts of the manor. The walls that surrounded him were made not of obsidian, but of onyx. An incredible amount of light-absorbing onyx. He saw a number of doors on both sides of himself, and for a second he was unsure of where to

Without even needing to consult Drow's older memories, he realized that he should just check his radar. It's the only logical course of action. He told himself, checking the thing to see who else was in the palace-like estate.

It took him just a few seconds to do so, and he was surprised to find that the place was as empty as Drow believed it to be. An inspection of his radar revealed very few nearby creatures, aside from some of the vermin who called the lonely halls of the place home, and fungi growing on the exterior of the residence.

He made contact with the fungi, sending each mushroom, bit of mold, and more messages while readying himself for his confrontation with Drow's family. In doing so he randomly gained several worshipers, something which delighted the deity of spores, fungi, and more.

And then the deity traveled through the estate's main home. He traveled through walls and doors, experiencing the same lack of resistance while going through them as he did when he traveled through the magically sealed door.

Before he knew it he was outside of the dining room, a fact he knew because he recognized the hallway he was in, the distinct door leading into the room, and he could smell the residual scent of recently cooked fungi, the meal that the matron of the Banethal estate had finished eating just a few minutes ago.

The curious deity, did his best to control the quiet but not undetectable bit of anger he felt the longer he looked at the door that separated him from the figures who had hurt his servant. When he felt ready, calm, and in control, he passed through the door.

When he passed through the door what laid in front of him was a long room that was dominated by an ornate obsidian table. He was on one end of it, and on the other sat two dark elves.

One of them was a tall, muscular fellow in an unbuttoned silk robe that revealed powerful pectoral muscles and suggested the rest of his body was as powerful as what he displayed openly. The other dark elf was a woman with a waifish build, dressed in a supernaturally beautiful red dress

The spell-singing oracle and her mate, a rare berserker, oracle multi-class dark elf, realized that they weren't alone at the same time. They both reacted to the invisible intruder by turning to face it, with different expressions on their faces.

The spell-singer, a beautiful dark elf wearing a radiantly beautiful dress that kept her eyes closed and grinned at the indistinct entity who was on the other side of their dining room table. She gestured nobly at a seat next to her, and then opened her mouth to speak.

"Why hello there Althos. Won't you take a seat? My son speaks so highly of you, that I've been just dying to meet you." She spoke confidently and self-assuredly, believing that her abilities, the gift she had prepared for the deity, and that the combination of traits that she was told the odd god possessed by Drow before he was knocked out, would prevent Althos from killing her outright and would cause the deity to view her pragmatically rather than as an enemy.

Althos not only saw the dark elves, but he also saw the simple codex that laid between the two lovers. He was unsure of what to do, but he sensed no hostility coming off of the female dark elf and sensed only fear radiating off of her muscular companion.

Should I humor them? Maybe let them put their guards down? He wondered. A not insignificant part of him wanted to reach out for the codex, which explained why the deity slowly approached the pair.

After a few moments, he decided to commit to his decision and fully approached the pair of dark elves. As he did so, he studied the evocation spells at his disposal, briefly considering whether or not to just immolate the pair of dark elves for their murderous behavior and treatment of his servant. But only for a moment.

Self-improvement is hard. He thought when his incorporeal form was right next to the spell-singer, as he readied a spell, just in case one of the two dark elves did something he couldn't predict. A real possibility given their odd behavior, attacking their son and welcoming their son's master with what looked like very superficial, very open, arms.