"What is power worth, to me?" I asked myself as I mulled over the successes of my decision to become a god of evil, at least in Salifinos. It was difficult for me to say it was little when I considered how easily my forces were overwhelming my enemies and the power I had just gained.

I felt the power of the second tier of influence over necromancy coursing through me. It felt... good. And I also felt, more keenly than ever, the hatred my undead minions possessed towards the living. I could feel it within me, thanks to my connection with my undead minions increasing in potency. Their hatred was now a dull roar I felt in the back of my mind.

I felt it all. The nearly mindless hate most undead felt towards the living. The distinct, dehydrated thirst vampires felt towards blood and blood alone. The envy shadows felt towards the living. The incredible wrath felt by wraiths and wrights. And the other, universally sinful emotions felt by the undead who worshiped me.

"This feels... good." I muttered as I felt the darkness of their emotions, mixed with the sheer weight of the hatred they felt, attempt to infiltrate my heart. I sighed and disregarded it, effortlessly pushing it away from me and rejecting it.

"That said... I'm not gonna be evil everywhere. So I can't accept this darkness. It'd interfere with me becoming a god of goodness, life, and healing." I reminded myself, pushing away the worst of the emotions.

I sighed and began to read the notification that awarded me the second tier of influence over the necromancy subdomain.

Alert: Your undead hordes have begun to near-mindlessly exterminate mortal settlements across the war-torn planet of Salifinos. Several communities with populations over 5,000 have been exterminated already and many more are in the process of being destroyed. Congratulations on acquiring the second tier of influence over the subdomain of necromancy.

These are the key powers you've gained. But there are other, synergistic ones as well.

New necromancy passive powers:

Reanimation mastery: The second tier of influence over the subdomain of necromancy brings with it total control over reanimation. This potent power grants gods with it the ability to bring corpses to unlife remotely, freely, and also deanimate corporeal undead

This power allows you to raise armies of the simplest undead at will, provided corpses exist to reanimate. It also allows you to destroy armies of the simplest undead as well. You can also take existing corporeal undead and snatch away any control someone else may have over them and instead make them your servants.

Intermediate undead mastery: Liches, death-kings, and other intermediate-tier undead such as grim-reapers, and flesh titans, will now begin to worship you just as lesser undead do. They can no longer resist your influence. This includes the weakest of the extraplanars who are undead. You can also create them from appropriate corpses and conditions.

Necromantic lord: This is perhaps the strongest power you've acquired as a result of gaining this tier of influence. With this, if someone is a mortal necromancer you can completely strip them of their abilities to use necromantic magic. You cannot yet do this to undead beings who are necromancers, but with this power you can not only give power to mortals, you can take it away.

New necromancy active powers:

Deadly gaze: Synergistic, once a day power that allows you to kill with a glance.

Conversion: This power allows you to instantly turn a living person who worships you into an undead creature of your choice.

The eerie power that coursed through me was the power of the unholy subdomain of necromancy. It was a strange, corrosive power and feeling it within me made me want to cause more carnage and misery. That said I pushed those feelings down, and closed my eyes.

The not-so-minimap filled my view and brought a macabre smile to my face. I could see all of the relatively nearby communities, communities that were filled with death, destruction, and the nightmarish undead monsters who served me.

Corpses abounded in these towns, corpses that were just waiting to be brought back to unholy unlife. I could feel them, and the idea that they should just sit where they died and rot felt... disgusting. It felt almost offensive.

I kept my eyes closed and focused on each body I could find. In doing so I was targeting them. I kept them firmly locked in my mind and then envisioned the necromantic power that infused me seeping out of my skin and into the ground at my feet.

I envisioned that very same energy crawling out of my skin and beginning the long path it would have to take to reach the bodies near me and not so near me. I imagined the energy traveling, in some cases for dozens of kilometers, and eventually reaching each body. And then I mentally willed the bodies to reanimate.

I pictured the bodies beginning to move again. Slowly at first, as if reacclimating to the land of the living. I imagined that limbs regrew and even heads themselves were remade.

I pictured nearly wholly destroyed bodies, being regrown from single limbs, or even lone digits. And I made my will manifest. Or rather, I tried.

It turned out that remaking bodies wasn't an easy thing to do. I had powers that aided in this, and one that should have made this process automatic that was evidently... not working, but the less of the body that remained, the harder this was to do. Even with my powers over necromancy and healing, this strained and stressed my mind if I was trying to do it en-masse.

My undead creations were hungry, gluttonous little things. They had devoured people nearly entirely whenever they could. If I wanted to recreate as many corpses as possible to add to my legions, I needed to be creative and forward-thinking.

And it just so turned out the thought of creating bodies, reminded me of a power of mine. A life-domain ability that I fully suspected wasn't intended to work the way I was about to use it.

I possessed the power to create bodies. It was one of my newer abilities. And incidentally, one of the species that I could create them for were humans. The people of the towns my forces had overwhelmed were entirely human.

The first non-necromantic power I used was my power to create bodies. But I mixed it with my powers over healing and targeted the singular limbs and digits that my undead servants had overlooked or left behind after a full and satisfying meal.

I smiled grimly as my powers washed over the faintest bodily remains of countless thousand humans. I could somehow sense their limbs begin to radiate a distinct silvery glow as they began to serve as the focus around which entire bodies appeared throughout the fallen villages. This was a challenge, as it involved a lot of careful manipulations I wasn't used to doing. Like training an unfamiliar muscle.

"Come on... Help out..." I muttered, as the act of doing so many things at once strained even my mind. I was talking to the domain of time, another domain whose influence I sensed could help.

"It might be easier if you just help me out. Locally... rewind time or something!" I grumbled, asking for some aid from a greater domain. I heard an almost robotic chuckle in the back of my mind. After hearing that I could have sworn it began to be a bit easier for me to do this. But it's well within the realm of possibility that I was inadvertently wanting something to be true rather than actually seeing a pattern.

Eventually though, I began to feel it. I began to feel myself inch towards success.

"That's it..." I muttered, smiling as I spoke. The smile on my face would have likely unsettled anyone who saw it, had they been members of the living. My only company at the moment were the undead.

All over the fallen villages, bodies sprang into being. They were not alive, instead they were the exact corpses of the fallen. It took several minutes, as even for a god this was an unusual act, but when it began to happen I cheered internally. As it happened, I heard an annoyed sigh.

"Oh come on! Did you manage to do it, successfully, even without my help? Darn it!" A voice grumbled in my mind.

"I can't believe you succeeded! And after I even turned off the power that let you use singular scraps of flesh and bone to make bodies whole..." Complained the subdomain of necromancy. It sounded annoyed. I chuckled at its expense. That did explain why doing this felt harder than when I had done it in the past. I had done this before, and it shouldn't have felt like this much effort.

"You're only encouraging me to diversify the powers and domains I make use of." I told the annoyed subdomain. I didn't even know why it was annoyed in the first place. Pragmatically what I had just done should have made it overjoyed, I had slaughtered the living and was hells-bent on reanimating them to serve me.

"Why are you even annoyed?" I asked the subdomain. I heard a surprisingly cat-like hiss in my head as a response and it was followed by silence. It took the subdomain nearly a full two minutes to formulate an answer.

"Because so far you've only used undead creatures in relation to life! You fought living slavers with the undead, and now you're fighting mortals as an evil god, which is an improvement, but you've put them in the hands of abominations!" The subdomain told me, which made a certain kind of sense. That said, I still sighed in response.

"I want you to use undead to create more undead! Not to help the living jockey for power!" The subdomain snapped. I could feel its irritation growing.

"If you just used me... You could build cults that don't need food, or to breathe... They could worship you for all eternity as their creator and lord. And yet you restrain them. And use them solely in relation to the living." The subdomain told me. There was a sudden tonal shift that caught me off guard.

"You have undead worshipers. You care for and perform miracles for the living, but what about the undead? Do they not deserve a god worth worshipping?" The subdomain asked, rather pointedly.

I mulled over this for a few moments. It was a revealing statement. The subdomain of necromancy wasn't as interested in universal unlife as I thought, or at least it was more interested in multiple things and not purely an entity of unmaking. That said, this remark wasn't entirely fair.

"I understand your perspective, but I don't feel that you're being entirely fair here. I have awoken once nearly mindless undead. I have fulfilled your quests. I have made undead out of creatures I've killed, and also reanimated corpses that were long dead. Your anger isn't fair. At least not fully." I told the subdomain, defending myself and pointing out that at least some of what it felt wasn't accurate.

"I am pursuing power. I am finally inching towards building faiths around myself. And that's an admittedly imperfect process so far, but I am still doing it. It takes time! What makes you think I don't care about the undead?" I asked, curious and also still shocked by the fact that a subdomain apparently just shut off access to a power of mine. I hadn't known they could do that.

"You don't destroy for destruction's sake! You don't kill to create more undead. You do it for reasons. Real ones!" The subdomain told me, shocking me with the absurdity of its response. I was mulling over that response when my thoughts were interrupted by the intrusion of another voice.

"Althos, you're overthinking this. The necromancy subdomain is a chaotic one. Its reasoning is... poor, at best. It is a creature of raw power and destruction. It seeks to overwhelm universes and commit omnicide for the sake of filling entire universes with undead monsters. Don't try to apply logic to it." Muttered the voice. It was a voice I was familiar with, as it belonged to the domain of knowledge.

Listening to that helped center my thoughts, but it didn't make me feel better. I groaned in annoyance.

"Since you managed to succeed... I suppose I'll turn your power back on. But the next quest I devise is going to be far grander in scale!" The necromantic subdomain told me, sounding more like an angry child than an embodiment of an entire school of magic. There was something mildly amusing about that though.

That was when I received an interesting notification. One that took a second to truly catch my eye. It was a prayer, from a figure with a familiar name.

Lord Althos... I come to you in search of a purpose. In search of a destiny. I am approaching you, on my hands and knees, metaphorically speaking, because I seek... I seek a master.

My name is Ava and I am a 'freed' slave from the city of Aronms. When you commanded the Ardor family to liberate their slaves, I was one of the ones who resisted. But I and others like me were defeated. And the Ardors refused to let us stay with them. We suspect they feared to anger you.

I have spent these last few days in search of a purpose. In search of a master to serve. And, because of your emphasis on personal freedoms, those I've approached have rejected me. So now, I'm plainly approaching you.

I am freely choosing to approach you and ask for a purpose. I know not the intricate ways of prayer, or even how to ask for a master, but that's ultimately what I seek. Would you please allow me to serve you?

If so, please tell me how I am to serve. I care not what role you put me in, solely that you decide my destiny. Which in a way you did. I am now asking you to reconsider in my case, and to consider how to give purpose to the others like me, who didn't want to be freed.

Do we not have the freedom to decide to serve, of our own volition? If we do, just know this: I decide to serve you. I only seek direction in how you'd like me to do that.

"Ava? Aoife's sister... How intriguing." I muttered, a sadistic smile on my face as a mortal asked me to "decide her destiny".

I of course knew of her already. I knew that she and a few others had wanted to continue to serve the dark elves. That they were an odd camp wanted to be with their slave-owners, and that they had been thoroughly broken by those who called them their "masters".

I also knew that their hearts were still filled with a longing to have some sort of purpose, which they felt I had taken from them. It was an odd condition. But Ava was the first of her kind to approach me so boldly. So I wanted to "reward" her. And I could picture a few ways to do so.