I took the hand of the demon I plotted to transform into a demon lord and stepped into the tunnel. Sombra eagerly stepped into it behind me, all while intertwining her fingers in mine. I could hear the demon's heartbeat quicken.

When we were inside of the dark, subterranean tunnel I rose my hand and the door behind us slid shut. It closed with a dull thud, and Sombra didn't turn back to gaze at it, she kept her eyes obsessively fixated on me. I felt the intensity of her thoughts about me, the obsessive love she felt, and the way she wanted to stay by my side at all times.

We were inside of a narrow tunnel, one that would lead us into the deepest parts of the royal palace if we stayed inside of it. There was no light where we were but that didn't bother us in the slightest as she was a demon of darkness who was fully capable of seeing, even in the dark, and I was a deity of darkness and truth whose eyes didn't need any light at all to work.

We began to walk down the tunnel and as we did Sombra began to speak. She was excited to talk and was eager to tell me everything that had happened in the Blackened Boscage while I was accruing more power.

"Master, my training is now complete! I am now fit to be a cleric of the Hungering Void. And to serve you by your side again..." Sombra declared, excitedly.

"I presided over the sacrifice of a humanoid. To one of your children no less!" She told me, gazing lovingly at the back of my head as she spoke. As she spoke I heard her thoughts, which turned to the topic of having children. She both imagined having children with someone I picked for her to mate with, and also the thought of having my children.

"If you... had children, would they be conquistadors?" She asked, curiously. I chuckled as we made our way deeper and deeper into the tunnels. I thought about her question for a few moments before answering, so that I could instantaneously check my list of powers and give her a thoughtful answer. When I next spoke it was with knowledge concerning myself and my powers.

"I have total control over things like the species of any children I have. Along with things like their gender and sex, as well as whether or not they have any sparks of divinity or any qualities of the sorts of higher beings I am at the moment they are conceived. If I wanted to, I could even give them innate power over domains and subdomains I can influence." I told her, having taken a moment to ensure that I was telling the truth. I didn't mind Sombra knowing these sorts of things.

"If I wanted too I could use my eldritch genetics to cause a human woman to give birth to a dragon or an elemental. I could mate with celestials and have them give birth to creatures that are naturally high up on the infernal hierarchy. My power over life, over the eldritch domain, and over the domains of souls and faith gave given me that much power." I told her, opting to give examples to cement the remarkable nature of this particularly strange set of powers. When she heard me say that even she couldn't help but to shudder both in awe and in fear.

I had of course thought about this in the past. I had even considered having Sombra be the mother of my children, but I hadn't given it any serious thought. A not small part of me liked the thought of seeing Sombra heavy with my child, especially since I was now beginning to inch towards omnipotence and thus I'd be able to give any child of mine considerable power.

"Do you want children?" Sombra asked, continuing to gaze at me curiously. That was a harder question for me to answer and so I considered it carefully before answering.

I didn't freeze time. I didn't need to for something like this. That said I did slow it down. My power over time was now fairly nuanced and so I could tweak time in subtle ways without doing something as drastic as freezing it altogether.

I allowed myself to slow down with time, at least on a purely physical level. This gave me the space I needed to actually contemplate whether or not I wanted children.

"If I had a child, it'd be a unique being like myself." I mentally muttered. As a fully living deity, I knew that if I opted to have children they would have been totally distinct, difficult to classify creatures. Even if I granted my children no divine traits they'd still be paragons of their species.

"That said it's not like it's truly time anyway..." I said to myself, keenly aware that I was still not every kind of higher being. I still needed to become an angel lord and an archon monarch, and I knew that other, hidden sorts of higher beings existed as well.

"But the biggest problem might well be that I don't know who I'd want to be a mother for my children. I could of course have multiple mothers for my children, but I still need to devise a mechanism by which I can decide who to have children with..." I realized, all while considering who I'd want to one day be mothers for any true children of mine.

However, even as complex as all of these factors were, they made my current answer to Sombra's inquiry quite clear. Which made answering her all the easier.

"I do want children. When I am an overgod. I don't want to be a father until the day I have proven that I am fully capable of defeating someone as powerful as an overgod's vestige and thus proving that I stand at the top of existence." I told Sombra, truthfully.

She gazed at me for a moment as we strode closer and closer to the entrance to the royal palace. Ahead of us loomed a wall with another cloaked wall, but I just wanted to be in the palace so I wasn't going to be as nice as I had been before.

"You as a father... I wonder what kind of creature, or creatures, you'd want to give birth to your children..." Sombra muttered, and I could hear both hope and curiosity in her voice. She lightly squeezed my hand and I could feel a part of her obsession intensify as her mind pictured her various forms heavily pregnant. It made me chuckle, inwardly. She was one of the people I considered a potential mother for my hypothetical children, especially if she became a demon lord.

As we approached the wall, I rose my free hand and pointed it at the wall. As a demon lord of gluttony, I had a number of powers including the ability to eat absolutely anything and even to eat things from a distance. I didn't hesitate to activate those powers and as I did I got to watch a massive bite mark appear on the wall in front of Sombra and I. A split second later another one appeared elsewhere on the wall. And then another and another.

The bite marks then stopped appearing on the wall and I closed my hand and felt my stomach fill with the stones that made up the wall in front of me. The rest of the wall crumbled away and disintegrated, allowing Sombra and myself passage into the royal palace. I continued my slow walk forward, now entering the palace in full.

We stepped into the deepest part of the royal palace, and as we did I closed my eyes and displayed my potent mastery over darkness. Sombra gasped as darkness began to seep out of me and fill the tunnel I had stepped into, as well as the room I was in. I was here to display my might and to do that I was determined to fully embrace and make use of my nature as an eldritch god, a deity of reality-defying power and terror.

Eldritch gods were masters of madness and terror and to ensure that my power over the people of Retribution remained unchallenged and respected by all of the people, I was going to need to enact some changes and inflict some fear.

The darkness that had seeped out of the young god who was inside of the depths of the palace wasn't mere darkness. Althos was a god of more than just darkness and so darkness he created was capable of being more than ordinary darkness.

The first person to see the darkness and to be surrounded by it was a simple palace guard. He was an ordinary spellcaster, an evoker who wielded respectable powers over fire and ice, and as the darkness raced out of a door leading to a stairwell, towards him, he pointed his hand at the darkness and unleashed a powerful fireball at it. As the fireball surged towards the gigantic wave of darkness the guard began to feel less and less sure that it would work.

The fireball, a circular mass of bright orange flames, collided with the darkness and didn't explode. To the guard's surprise and dismay the fireball was instead hungrily absorbed by the darkness and faded into it when it hit the almost solid wave of darkness. The guard opened his mouth to cry out but fear crept into his heart as the wave surged towards him and silenced the scream in his throat.

He braced for impact when the wave was almost upon him, covering his face with his hands to dilute the impact he feared he'd feel and closing his eyes almost unconsciously. Instead of being bowled over by a thick wave of darkness, he was just immersed in it and totally surrounded on all sides by pitch-black darkness.

A few moments passed before he dared to uncover his face, and during those moments he was perfectly still and felt a fear of the pain he sincerely believed he was about to be in. It was only when he didn't feel the dreaded impact for almost half a minute that he slowly moved his hands down and opened his eyes.

"What... What is this?" He asked, vocalizing his thoughts after uncovering his face and opening his eyes. He couldn't see a damn thing, not even himself, in the darkness that totally surrounded the man. He opened his mouth to speak again, when something inside of the strange darkness began to cackle, eerily.

Meanwhile Althos and Sombra continued their gradual march to the throne room, seeking the leaders of Retribution for some retribution of their own.